Polysorbates 20 and 80 used in the formulation of protein biotherapeutics: structure and degradation pathways.

Science.gov (United States)

Kerwin, Bruce A

2008-08-01

Polysorbates 20 and 80 (Tween 20 and Tween 80) are used in the formulation of biotherapeutic products for both preventing surface adsorption and as stabilizers against protein aggregation. The polysorbates are amphipathic, nonionic surfactants composed of fatty acid esters of polyoxyethylene sorbitan being polyoxyethylene sorbitan monolaurate for polysorbate 20 and polyoxyethylene sorbitan monooleate for polysorbate 80. The polysorbates used in the formulation of biopharmaceuticals are mixtures of different fatty acid esters with the monolaurate fraction of polysorbate 20 making up only 40-60% of the mixture and the monooleate fraction of polysorbate 80 making up >58% of the mixture. The polysorbates undergo autooxidation, cleavage at the ethylene oxide subunits and hydrolysis of the fatty acid ester bond. Autooxidation results in hydroperoxide formation, side-chain cleavage and eventually formation of short chain acids such as formic acid all of which could influence the stability of a biopharmaceutical product. Oxidation of the fatty acid moiety while well described in the literature has not been specifically investigated for polysorbate. This review focuses on the chemical structure of the polysorbates, factors influencing micelle formation and factors and excipients influencing stability and degradation of the polyoxyethylene and fatty acid ester linkages.

Immunogenicity of glycans on biotherapeutic drugs produced in plant expression systems—The taliglucerase alfa story

Science.gov (United States)

Rup, Bonita; Alon, Sari; Amit-Cohen, Bat-Chen; Brill Almon, Einat; Chertkoff, Raul; Rudd, Pauline M.

2017-01-01

Plants are a promising alternative for the production of biotherapeutics. Manufacturing in-planta adds plant specific glycans. To understand immunogenic potential of these glycans, we developed a validated method to detect plant specific glycan antibodies in human serum. Using this assay, low prevalence of pre-existing anti-plant glycan antibodies was found in healthy humans (13.5%) and in glucocerebrosidase-deficient Gaucher disease (GD) patients (5%). A low incidence (9% in naïve patient and none in treatment experienced patients) of induced anti-plant glycan antibodies was observed in GD patients after up to 30 months replacement therapy treatment with taliglucerase alfa, a version of human glucocerebrosidase produced in plant cells. Detailed evaluation of clinical safety and efficacy endpoints indicated that anti-plant glycan antibodies did not affect the safety or efficacy of taliglucerase alfa in patients. This study shows the benefit of using large scale human trials to evaluate the immunogenicity risk of plant derived glycans, and indicates no apparent risk related to anti-plant glycan antibodies. PMID:29088235

Glycoengineering of CHO Cells to Improve Product Quality.

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Qiong; Yin, Bojiao; Chung, Cheng-Yu; Betenbaugh, Michael J

2017-01-01

Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells represent the predominant platform in biopharmaceutical industry for the production of recombinant biotherapeutic proteins, especially glycoproteins. These glycoproteins include oligosaccharide or glycan attachments that represent one of the principal components dictating product quality. Especially important are the N-glycan attachments present on many recombinant glycoproteins of commercial interest. Furthermore, altering the glycan composition can be used to modulate the production quality of a recombinant biotherapeutic from CHO and other mammalian hosts. This review first describes the glycosylation network in mammalian cells and compares the glycosylation patterns between CHO and human cells. Next genetic strategies used in CHO cells to modulate the sialylation patterns through overexpression of sialyltransfereases and other glycosyltransferases are summarized. In addition, other approaches to alter sialylation including manipulation of sialic acid biosynthetic pathways and inhibition of sialidases are described. Finally, this review also covers other strategies such as the glycosylation site insertion and manipulation of glycan heterogeneity to produce desired glycoforms for diverse biotechnology applications.

A generic template for automated bioanalytical ligand-binding assays using modular robotic scripts in support of discovery biotherapeutic programs.

Science.gov (United States)

Duo, Jia; Dong, Huijin; DeSilva, Binodh; Zhang, Yan J

2013-07-01

Sample dilution and reagent pipetting are time-consuming steps in ligand-binding assays (LBAs). Traditional automation-assisted LBAs use assay-specific scripts that require labor-intensive script writing and user training. Five major script modules were developed on Tecan Freedom EVO liquid handling software to facilitate the automated sample preparation and LBA procedure: sample dilution, sample minimum required dilution, standard/QC minimum required dilution, standard/QC/sample addition, and reagent addition. The modular design of automation scripts allowed the users to assemble an automated assay with minimal script modification. The application of the template was demonstrated in three LBAs to support discovery biotherapeutic programs. The results demonstrated that the modular scripts provided the flexibility in adapting to various LBA formats and the significant time saving in script writing and scientist training. Data generated by the automated process were comparable to those by manual process while the bioanalytical productivity was significantly improved using the modular robotic scripts.

Model-based analysis of N-glycosylation in Chinese hamster ovary cells

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Krambeck, Frederick J.; Bennun, Sandra V; Andersen, Mikael Rørdam

2017-01-01

The Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell is the gold standard for manufacturing of glycosylated recombinant proteins for production of biotherapeutics. The similarity of its glycosylation patterns to the human versions enable the products of this cell line favorable pharmacokinetic properties and lower...

The role of ECToolbox software in evaluating bio-therapeutic effect on acute myocardial infarct of pig modal

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Zou Renjian; Meng Shu; Fu Hongliang; Wu Jingchuan; Wang Hui

2009-01-01

Objective: The aim of this study was to estimate the role of ECToolbox software in evaluating the bio-therapeutic effect on acute myocardial infarction of pig model by angiopoietin-related protein 2 (Ad. ARP2). Methods: Sixteen acute myocardial infarction pigs were divided into groups A and B. Group A was intra-myocardial injected with Ad. ARP2 gene and group B was control with intra-myocardial injected of saline. Gated myocardial perfusion imaging was performed one and four weeks after the injection. To evaluate the bio-therapeutic effect, data was acquired and analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively with ECToolbox to observe the territory, extent and severity of myocardial defect. SPSS 10.0 was used for the statistical analysis. By applying the scoring system for each segment of the 20-segments model to the myocardial perfusion images, a mean score could be derived. Comparisons for the data of one and four weeks after the injection in the same group were made with the paired t-test, and for the data of different groups were made with t-test. Results: (1) The mean score of ischemic lateral wall was 1.99±0.85 and 1.71±0.85 respectively at one and four weeks after the injection. The mean score of ischemic inferior wall was 1.86±0.67 and 1.65±0.73 respectively. (2) The radioactivity ratios of defect area to the whole left ventricle in the first week and the fourth week were 25.75±7.16 and 31.57±5.64 on the short axis (t=3.83, P<0.01), 30.55±4.80 and 36.03± 6.27 on the vertical long axis (t=3.71, P<0.01), 25.03±2.65 and 27.42±3.48 on horizontal long axis (t= 2.88, P<0.01). (3) Polar maps showed myocardial defect extent of the fourth week was smaller than that of the first week. The percentage of defect area to the whole left ventricle in the first and fourth week was (16.58±5.78)% and (12.66±4.90)%. (4) Mean left ventricular eject fraction (LVEF) of group A was (43.99±5.96)% and (61.03±8.74)% respectively after one and four weeks. Conclusions: Bio

Microscale to manufacturing scale-up of cell-free cytokine production--a new approach for shortening protein production development timelines.

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Zawada, James F; Yin, Gang; Steiner, Alexander R; Yang, Junhao; Naresh, Alpana; Roy, Sushmita M; Gold, Daniel S; Heinsohn, Henry G; Murray, Christopher J

2011-07-01

Engineering robust protein production and purification of correctly folded biotherapeutic proteins in cell-based systems is often challenging due to the requirements for maintaining complex cellular networks for cell viability and the need to develop associated downstream processes that reproducibly yield biopharmaceutical products with high product quality. Here, we present an alternative Escherichia coli-based open cell-free synthesis (OCFS) system that is optimized for predictable high-yield protein synthesis and folding at any scale with straightforward downstream purification processes. We describe how the linear scalability of OCFS allows rapid process optimization of parameters affecting extract activation, gene sequence optimization, and redox folding conditions for disulfide bond formation at microliter scales. Efficient and predictable high-level protein production can then be achieved using batch processes in standard bioreactors. We show how a fully bioactive protein produced by OCFS from optimized frozen extract can be purified directly using a streamlined purification process that yields a biologically active cytokine, human granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor, produced at titers of 700 mg/L in 10 h. These results represent a milestone for in vitro protein synthesis, with potential for the cGMP production of disulfide-bonded biotherapeutic proteins. Copyright © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Laboratory automation of high-quality and efficient ligand-binding assays for biotherapeutic drug development.

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Wang, Jin; Patel, Vimal; Burns, Daniel; Laycock, John; Pandya, Kinnari; Tsoi, Jennifer; DeSilva, Binodh; Ma, Mark; Lee, Jean

2013-07-01

Regulated bioanalytical laboratories that run ligand-binding assays in support of biotherapeutics development face ever-increasing demand to support more projects with increased efficiency. Laboratory automation is a tool that has the potential to improve both quality and efficiency in a bioanalytical laboratory. The success of laboratory automation requires thoughtful evaluation of program needs and fit-for-purpose strategies, followed by pragmatic implementation plans and continuous user support. In this article, we present the development of fit-for-purpose automation of total walk-away and flexible modular modes. We shared the sustaining experience of vendor collaboration and team work to educate, promote and track the use of automation. The implementation of laboratory automation improves assay performance, data quality, process efficiency and method transfer to CRO in a regulated bioanalytical laboratory environment.

Impact of product-related factors on immunogenicity of biotherapeutics.

Science.gov (United States)

Singh, Satish Kumar

2011-02-01

All protein therapeutics have the potential to be immunogenic. Several factors, including patient characteristics, disease state, and the therapy itself, influence the generation of an immune response. Product-related factors such as the molecule design, the expression system, post-translational modifications, impurities, contaminants, formulation and excipients, container, closure, as well as degradation products are all implicated. However, a critical examination of the available data shows that clear unequivocal evidence for the impact of these latter factors on clinical immunogenicity is lacking. No report could be found that clearly deconvolutes the clinical impact of the product attributes on patient susceptibility. Aggregation carries the greatest concern as a risk factor for immunogenicity, but the impact of aggregates is likely to depend on their structure as well as on the functionality (e.g., immunostimulatory or immunomodulatory) of the therapeutic. Preclinical studies are not yet capable of assessing the clinically relevant immunogenicity potential of these product-related factors. Simply addressing these risk factors as part of product development will not eliminate immunogenicity. Minimization of immunogenicity has to begin at the molecule design stage by reducing or eliminating antigenic epitopes and building in favorable physical and chemical properties. Copyright © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Industrial Production of Therapeutic Proteins: Cell Lines, Cell Culture, and Purification

Science.gov (United States)

Zhu, Marie M.; Mollet, Michael; Hubert, Rene S.

The biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries have seen a recent surge in the development of biological drug products manufactured from engineered mammalian cell lines. Since the hugely successful launch of human tissue plasminogen activator in 1987 and erythropoietin in 1988, the biopharmaceutical market has grown immensely. Global sales in 2003 exceeded US 30 billion.1 Currently, a total of 108 biotherapeutics are approved and available to patients (Table 32.1). In addition, 324 medically related, biotechnology-derived medicines for nearly 150 diseases are in clinical trials or under review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.2 These biopharmaceutical candidates promise to bring more and better treatments to patients. Compared to small molecule drugs, biotherapeutics show exquisite specificity with fewer off-target interactions and improved safety profiles.

Monitoring Quality of Biotherapeutic Products Using Multivariate Data Analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Rathore, Anurag S; Pathak, Mili; Jain, Renu; Jadaun, Gaurav Pratap Singh

2016-07-01

Monitoring the quality of pharmaceutical products is a global challenge, heightened by the implications of letting subquality drugs come to the market on public safety. Regulatory agencies do their due diligence at the time of approval as per their prescribed regulations. However, product quality needs to be monitored post-approval as well to ensure patient safety throughout the product life cycle. This is particularly complicated for biotechnology-based therapeutics where seemingly minor changes in process and/or raw material attributes have been shown to have a significant effect on clinical safety and efficacy of the product. This article provides a perspective on the topic of monitoring the quality of biotech therapeutics. In the backdrop of challenges faced by the regulatory agencies, the potential use of multivariate data analysis as a tool for effective monitoring has been proposed. Case studies using data from several insulin biosimilars have been used to illustrate the key concepts.

Relationship between genetic similarity and some productive traits ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

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Random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) technique was applied to detect genetic similarity between five local chicken strains that have been selected for eggs and meat production in Egypt. Based on six oligonucleotide primers, the genetic similarity between the egg-producing strains (Anshas, Silver. Montazah and ...

Biotherapeutic effects of probiotic bacteria on candidiasis in immunodeficient mice.

Science.gov (United States)

Wagner, R D; Pierson, C; Warner, T; Dohnalek, M; Farmer, J; Roberts, L; Hilty, M; Balish, E

1997-10-01

Four species of probiotic bacteria were assessed for their capacities to protect athymic bg/bg-nu/nu and euthymic bg/bg-nu/+ mice from mucosal and systemic candidiasis. Each bacterial species and Candida albicans colonized the gastrointestinal tracts of both strains of mice. The presence of probiotic bacteria (Lactobacillus acidophilus, Lactobacillus reuteri, Lactobacillus casei GG, or Bifidobacterium animalis) in the gastrointestinal tracts prolonged the survival of adult and neonatal bg/bg-nu/nu mice compared to that of isogenic mice colonized with C. albicans alone. The incidence of systemic candidiasis in bg/bg-nu/nu mice was significantly reduced by each of the four probiotic bacterial species. The numbers of C. albicans present in the alimentary tracts of euthymic bg/bg-nu/+ mice were significantly reduced by L. casei GG and B. animalis. None of the probiotic bacteria species completely prevented mucosal candidiasis, but B. animalis reduced its incidence and severity. Probiotic bacteria also modulated antibody- and cell-mediated immune responses to C. albicans. The prolonged survival of mice, decreased severity of mucosal and systemic candidiasis, modulation of immune responses, decreased number of C. albicans in the alimentary tract, and reduced numbers of orogastric infections demonstrated not only that probiotic bacteria have biotherapeutic potential for prophylaxis against and therapy of this fungal disease but also that probiotic bacteria protect mice from candidiasis by a variety of immunologic (thymic and extrathymic) and nonimmunologic mechanisms in this model.

The Hofmethode: Computing Semantic Similarities between E-Learning Products

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Oliver Michel

2009-11-01

Full Text Available The key task in building useful e-learning repositories is to develop a system with an algorithm allowing users to retrieve information that corresponds to their specific requirements. To achieve this, products (or their verbal descriptions, i.e. presented in metadata need to be compared and structured according to the results of this comparison. Such structuring is crucial insofar as there are many search results that correspond to the entered keyword. The Hofmethode is an algorithm (based on psychological considerations to compute semantic similarities between texts and therefore offer a way to compare e-learning products. The computed similarity values are used to build semantic maps in which the products are visually arranged according to their similarities. The paper describes how the Hofmethode is implemented in the online database edulap, and how it contributes to help the user to explore the data in which he is interested.

On the Complexity of Inner Product Similarity Join

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Ahle, Thomas Dybdahl; Pagh, Rasmus; Razenshteyn, Ilya

2016-01-01

A number of tasks in classification, information retrieval, recommendation systems, and record linkage reduce to the core problem of inner product similarity join (IPS join): identifying pairs of vectors in a collection that have a sufficiently large inner product. IPS join is well understood when...... bounds for (A)LSH-based algorithms. In particular, we show that asymmetry can be avoided by relaxing the LSH definition to only consider the collision probability of distinct elements. A new indexing method for IPS based on linear sketches, implying that our hardness results are not far from being tight...

Improving Language Production Using Subtitled Similar Task Videos

Science.gov (United States)

Arslanyilmaz, Abdurrahman; Pedersen, Susan

2010-01-01

This study examines the effects of subtitled similar task videos on language production by nonnative speakers (NNSs) in an online task-based language learning (TBLL) environment. Ten NNS-NNS dyads collaboratively completed four communicative tasks, using an online TBLL environment specifically designed for this study and a chat tool in…

Correlating Information Contents of Gene Ontology Terms to Infer Semantic Similarity of Gene Products

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mingxin Gan

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Successful applications of the gene ontology to the inference of functional relationships between gene products in recent years have raised the need for computational methods to automatically calculate semantic similarity between gene products based on semantic similarity of gene ontology terms. Nevertheless, existing methods, though having been widely used in a variety of applications, may significantly overestimate semantic similarity between genes that are actually not functionally related, thereby yielding misleading results in applications. To overcome this limitation, we propose to represent a gene product as a vector that is composed of information contents of gene ontology terms annotated for the gene product, and we suggest calculating similarity between two gene products as the relatedness of their corresponding vectors using three measures: Pearson’s correlation coefficient, cosine similarity, and the Jaccard index. We focus on the biological process domain of the gene ontology and annotations of yeast proteins to study the effectiveness of the proposed measures. Results show that semantic similarity scores calculated using the proposed measures are more consistent with known biological knowledge than those derived using a list of existing methods, suggesting the effectiveness of our method in characterizing functional relationships between gene products.

Self-similarity of proton spin and asymmetry of jet production

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Tokarev, M.V.; Zborovsky, I.

2014-01-01

Self-similarity of jet production in polarized p + p collisions is studied. The concept of z-scaling is applied for description of inclusive spectra obtained with different orientations of proton spin. New data on the double longitudinal spin asymmetry, A LL , of jets produced in proton-proton collisions at √s = 200 GeV measured by the STAR Collaboration at RHIC are analyzed in the z-scaling approach. Hypotheses of self-similarity and fractality of internal spin structure are formulated. A possibility to extract information on spin-dependent fractal dimensions of proton from the asymmetry of jet production is justified. The spin-dependent fractal dimensions for the process p-bar+p-bar→jet+X are estimated.

A shortest-path graph kernel for estimating gene product semantic similarity

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alvarez Marco A

2011-07-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Existing methods for calculating semantic similarity between gene products using the Gene Ontology (GO often rely on external resources, which are not part of the ontology. Consequently, changes in these external resources like biased term distribution caused by shifting of hot research topics, will affect the calculation of semantic similarity. One way to avoid this problem is to use semantic methods that are "intrinsic" to the ontology, i.e. independent of external knowledge. Results We present a shortest-path graph kernel (spgk method that relies exclusively on the GO and its structure. In spgk, a gene product is represented by an induced subgraph of the GO, which consists of all the GO terms annotating it. Then a shortest-path graph kernel is used to compute the similarity between two graphs. In a comprehensive evaluation using a benchmark dataset, spgk compares favorably with other methods that depend on external resources. Compared with simUI, a method that is also intrinsic to GO, spgk achieves slightly better results on the benchmark dataset. Statistical tests show that the improvement is significant when the resolution and EC similarity correlation coefficient are used to measure the performance, but is insignificant when the Pfam similarity correlation coefficient is used. Conclusions Spgk uses a graph kernel method in polynomial time to exploit the structure of the GO to calculate semantic similarity between gene products. It provides an alternative to both methods that use external resources and "intrinsic" methods with comparable performance.

A new measure for functional similarity of gene products based on Gene Ontology

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Lengauer Thomas

2006-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Gene Ontology (GO is a standard vocabulary of functional terms and allows for coherent annotation of gene products. These annotations provide a basis for new methods that compare gene products regarding their molecular function and biological role. Results We present a new method for comparing sets of GO terms and for assessing the functional similarity of gene products. The method relies on two semantic similarity measures; simRel and funSim. One measure (simRel is applied in the comparison of the biological processes found in different groups of organisms. The other measure (funSim is used to find functionally related gene products within the same or between different genomes. Results indicate that the method, in addition to being in good agreement with established sequence similarity approaches, also provides a means for the identification of functionally related proteins independent of evolutionary relationships. The method is also applied to estimating functional similarity between all proteins in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and to visualizing the molecular function space of yeast in a map of the functional space. A similar approach is used to visualize the functional relationships between protein families. Conclusion The approach enables the comparison of the underlying molecular biology of different taxonomic groups and provides a new comparative genomics tool identifying functionally related gene products independent of homology. The proposed map of the functional space provides a new global view on the functional relationships between gene products or protein families.

Robust vaginal colonization of macaques with a novel vaginally disintegrating tablet containing a live biotherapeutic product to prevent HIV infection in women.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Laurel A Lagenaur

Full Text Available MucoCept is a biotherapeutic for prevention of HIV-1 infection in women and contains a human, vaginal Lactobacillus jensenii that has been genetically enhanced to express the HIV-1 entry inhibitor, modified cyanovirin-N (mCV-N. The objective of this study was to develop a solid vaginal dosage form that supports sustained vaginal colonization of the MucoCept Lactobacillus at levels previously shown, with freshly prepared cultures, to protect macaques from SHIV infection and to test this formulation in a macaque vaginal colonization model. Vaginally disintegrating tablets were prepared by lyophilizing the formulated bacteria in tablet-shaped molds, then packaging in foil pouches with desiccant. Disintegration time, potency and stability of the tablets were assessed. For colonization, non-synchronized macaques were dosed vaginally with either one tablet or five tablets delivered over five days. Vaginal samples were obtained at three, 14, and 21 days post-dosing and cultured to determine Lactobacillus colonization levels. To confirm identity of the MucoCept Lactobacillus strain, genomic DNA was extracted from samples on days 14 and 21 and a strain-specific PCR was performed. Supernatants from bacteria were tested for the presence of the mCV-N protein by Western blot. The tablets were easy to handle, disintegrated within two minutes, potent (5.7x1011 CFU/g, and stable at 4°C and 25°C. Vaginal administration of the tablets to macaques resulted in colonization of the MucoCept Lactobacillus in 66% of macaques at 14 days post-dosing and 83% after 21 days. There was no significant difference in colonization levels for the one or five tablet dosing regimens (p=0.88 Day 14, p=0.99 Day 21. Strain-specific PCR confirmed the presence of the bacteria even in culture-negative macaques. Finally, the presence of mCV-N protein was confirmed by Western blot analysis using a specific anti-mCV-N antibody.

Robust vaginal colonization of macaques with a novel vaginally disintegrating tablet containing a live biotherapeutic product to prevent HIV infection in women.

Science.gov (United States)

Lagenaur, Laurel A; Swedek, Iwona; Lee, Peter P; Parks, Thomas P

2015-01-01

MucoCept is a biotherapeutic for prevention of HIV-1 infection in women and contains a human, vaginal Lactobacillus jensenii that has been genetically enhanced to express the HIV-1 entry inhibitor, modified cyanovirin-N (mCV-N). The objective of this study was to develop a solid vaginal dosage form that supports sustained vaginal colonization of the MucoCept Lactobacillus at levels previously shown, with freshly prepared cultures, to protect macaques from SHIV infection and to test this formulation in a macaque vaginal colonization model. Vaginally disintegrating tablets were prepared by lyophilizing the formulated bacteria in tablet-shaped molds, then packaging in foil pouches with desiccant. Disintegration time, potency and stability of the tablets were assessed. For colonization, non-synchronized macaques were dosed vaginally with either one tablet or five tablets delivered over five days. Vaginal samples were obtained at three, 14, and 21 days post-dosing and cultured to determine Lactobacillus colonization levels. To confirm identity of the MucoCept Lactobacillus strain, genomic DNA was extracted from samples on days 14 and 21 and a strain-specific PCR was performed. Supernatants from bacteria were tested for the presence of the mCV-N protein by Western blot. The tablets were easy to handle, disintegrated within two minutes, potent (5.7x1011 CFU/g), and stable at 4°C and 25°C. Vaginal administration of the tablets to macaques resulted in colonization of the MucoCept Lactobacillus in 66% of macaques at 14 days post-dosing and 83% after 21 days. There was no significant difference in colonization levels for the one or five tablet dosing regimens (p=0.88 Day 14, p=0.99 Day 21). Strain-specific PCR confirmed the presence of the bacteria even in culture-negative macaques. Finally, the presence of mCV-N protein was confirmed by Western blot analysis using a specific anti-mCV-N antibody.

Potencial bioterapêutico dos probióticos nas parasitoses intestinais Probiotics as potential biotherapeutic agents targeting intestinal parasites

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Teresa Cristina Goulart de Oliveira-Sequeira

2008-12-01

Full Text Available Probióticos são microrganismos vivos que, se administrados em quantidades adequadas, promovem benefícios à saúde do homem e dos animais. O crescente interesse nos probióticos fundamenta-se em estudos clínicos nos quais a administração desses organismos foi avaliada na prevenção e no tratamento de desordens intestinais e sistêmicas. Os potenciais mecanismos de ação desses microrganismos incluem a exclusão competitiva, a produção de metabólitos com atividade antimicrobiana e a modulação da resposta imune. Em algumas circunstâncias clínicas específicas, os benefícios produzidos por esses microrganismos foram amplamente documentados, enquanto que em outras os resultados são contraditórios. No presente artigo de revisão, os probióticos foram abordados considerando-se o potencial bioterapêutico desses microrganismos nas parasitoses intestinais.Probiotics are live microorganisms which, when administered in adequate amounts, beneficially affect the general health status of man and animal. The great interest in probiotic microganisms is based on evidences from clinical studies indicating benefits in the prevention or treatment of a broad spectrum of gastrointestinal and systemic disorders. The potential mechanisms by which probiotics beneficially affect health include strengthening of the intestinal barrier, modulation of the immune response, and antagonism of pathogens either by the production of antimicrobial compounds or through competition for mucosal binding sites. In some specific clinical circumstances, there is clear evidence of benefit whereas in others, the results are dubious and important questions remaining unanswered. The aim of this review article is to focus probiotics on their potential as biotherapeutic agents against intestinal parasites.

Biopharmaceutical formulations for pre-filled delivery devices.

Science.gov (United States)

Jezek, Jan; Darton, Nicholas J; Derham, Barry K; Royle, Nikki; Simpson, Iain

2013-06-01

Pre-filled syringes are becoming an increasingly popular format for delivering biotherapeutics conveniently and cost effectively. The device design and stable liquid formulations required to enable this pre-filled syringe format are technically challenging. In choosing the materials and process conditions to fabricate the syringe unit, their compatibility with the biotherapeutic needs to be carefully assessed. The biothereaputic stability demanded for the production of syringe-compatible low-viscosity liquid solutions requires critical excipient choices to be made. The purpose of this review is to discuss key issues related to the stability aspects of biotherapeutics in pre-filled devices. This includes effects on both physical and chemical stability due to a number of stress conditions the product is subjected to, as well as interactions with the packaging system. Particular attention is paid to the control of stability by formulation. We anticipate that there will be a significant move towards polymer primary packaging for most drugs in the longer term. The timescales for this will depend on a number of factors and hence will be hard to predict. Formulation will play a critical role in developing successful products in the pre-filled syringe format, particularly with the trend towards concentrated biotherapeutics. Development of novel, smart formulation technologies will, therefore, be increasingly important.

Biosimilars--global issues, national solutions.

Science.gov (United States)

Knezevic, Ivana; Griffiths, Elwyn

2011-09-01

Biotechnology derived medicinal products are presently the best characterized biologicals with considerable production and clinical experience, and have revolutionized the treatment of some of the most difficult-to-treat diseases, prolonging and improving the quality of life and patient care. They are also currently one of the fastest growing segments of the pharmaceutical industry market. The critical challenge that the biopharmaceutical industry is facing is the expiry of patents for the first generation of biopharmaceuticals, mainly recombinant DNA derived products, such as interferons, growth hormone and erythropoetin. The question that immediately arose was how should such copies of the originator products be licensed, bearing in mind that they are highly complex biological molecules produced by equally complex biological production processes with their inherent problem of biological variability. Copying biologicals is much more complex than copying small molecules and the critical issue was how to handle the licensing of products if relying in part on data from an innovator product. Since 2004 there has been considerable international consultation on how to deal with biosimilars and biological copy products. This has led to a better understanding of the challenges in the regulatory evaluation of the quality, safety and efficacy of "biosimilars", to the exchange of information between regulators, as well as to the identification of key issues. The aim of this article is to provide a brief overview of the scientific and regulatory challenges faced in developing and evaluating similar biotherapeutic products for global use. It is intended as an introduction to the series of articles in this special issue of Biologicals devoted to similar biotherapeutic products. Copyright © 2011. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Comparative analysis of chemical similarity methods for modular natural products with a hypothetical structure enumeration algorithm.

Science.gov (United States)

Skinnider, Michael A; Dejong, Chris A; Franczak, Brian C; McNicholas, Paul D; Magarvey, Nathan A

2017-08-16

Natural products represent a prominent source of pharmaceutically and industrially important agents. Calculating the chemical similarity of two molecules is a central task in cheminformatics, with applications at multiple stages of the drug discovery pipeline. Quantifying the similarity of natural products is a particularly important problem, as the biological activities of these molecules have been extensively optimized by natural selection. The large and structurally complex scaffolds of natural products distinguish their physical and chemical properties from those of synthetic compounds. However, no analysis of the performance of existing methods for molecular similarity calculation specific to natural products has been reported to date. Here, we present LEMONS, an algorithm for the enumeration of hypothetical modular natural product structures. We leverage this algorithm to conduct a comparative analysis of molecular similarity methods within the unique chemical space occupied by modular natural products using controlled synthetic data, and comprehensively investigate the impact of diverse biosynthetic parameters on similarity search. We additionally investigate a recently described algorithm for natural product retrobiosynthesis and alignment, and find that when rule-based retrobiosynthesis can be applied, this approach outperforms conventional two-dimensional fingerprints, suggesting it may represent a valuable approach for the targeted exploration of natural product chemical space and microbial genome mining. Our open-source algorithm is an extensible method of enumerating hypothetical natural product structures with diverse potential applications in bioinformatics.

Carcinogenicity assessments of biotechnology-derived pharmaceuticals: a review of approved molecules and best practice recommendations.

Science.gov (United States)

Vahle, John L; Finch, Gregory L; Heidel, Shawn M; Hovland, David N; Ivens, Inge; Parker, Suezanne; Ponce, Rafael A; Sachs, Clifford; Steigerwalt, Ronald; Short, Brian; Todd, Marque D

2010-06-01

An important safety consideration for developing new therapeutics is assessing the potential that the therapy will increase the risk of cancer. For biotherapeutics, traditional two-year rodent bioassays are often not scientifically applicable or feasible. This paper is a collaborative effort of industry toxicologists to review past and current practice regarding carcinogenicity assessments of biotherapeutics and to provide recommendations. Publicly available information on eighty marketed protein biotherapeutics was reviewed. In this review, no assessments related to carcinogenicity or tumor growth promotion were identified for fifty-one of the eighty molecules. For the twenty-nine biotherapeutics in which assessments related to carcinogenicity were identified, various experimental approaches were employed. This review also discusses several key principles to aid in the assessment of carcinogenic potential, including (1) careful consideration of mechanism of action to identify theoretical risks, (2) careful investigation of existing data for indications of proliferative or immunosuppressive potential, and (3) characterization of any proliferative or immunosuppressive signals detected. Traditional two-year carcinogenicity assays should not be considered as the default method for assessing the carcinogenicity potential of biotherapeutics. If experimentation is considered warranted, it should be hypothesis driven and may include a variety of experimental models. Ultimately, it is important that preclinical data provide useful guidance in product labeling.

A global RNA-seq-driven analysis of CHO host and production cell lines reveals distinct differential expression patterns of genes contributing to recombinant antibody glycosylation.

Science.gov (United States)

Könitzer, Jennifer D; Müller, Markus M; Leparc, Germán; Pauers, Martin; Bechmann, Jan; Schulz, Patrick; Schaub, Jochen; Enenkel, Barbara; Hildebrandt, Tobias; Hampel, Martin; Tolstrup, Anne B

2015-09-01

Boehringer Ingelheim uses two CHO-DG44 lines for manufacturing biotherapeutics, BI-HEX-1 and BI-HEX-2, which produce distinct cell type-specific antibody glycosylation patterns. A recently established CHO-K1 descended host, BI-HEX-K1, generates antibodies with glycosylation profiles differing from CHO-DG44. Manufacturing process development is significantly influenced by these unique profiles. To investigate the underlying glycosylation related gene expression, we leveraged our CHO host and production cell RNA-seqtranscriptomics and product quality database together with the CHO-K1 genome. We observed that each BI-HEX host and antibody producing cell line has a unique gene expression fingerprint. CHO-DG44 cells only transcribe Fut10, Gfpt2 and ST8Sia6 when expressing antibodies. BI-HEX-K1 cells express ST8Sia6 at host cell level. We detected a link between BI-HEX-1/BI-HEX-2 antibody galactosylation and mannosylation and the gene expression of the B4galt gene family and genes controlling mannose processing. Furthermore, we found major differences between the CHO-DG44 and CHO-K1 lineages in the expression of sialyl transferases and enzymes synthesizing sialic acid precursors, providing a rationale for the lack of immunogenic NeuGc/NGNA synthesis in CHO. Our study highlights the value of systems biotechnology to understand glycoprotein synthesis and product glycoprofiles. Such data improve future production clone selection and process development strategies for better steering of biotherapeutic product quality. Copyright © 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

9 CFR 319.306 - Spaghetti with meatballs and sauce, spaghetti with meat and sauce, and similar products.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 9 Animals and Animal Products 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Spaghetti with meatballs and sauce... with meatballs and sauce, spaghetti with meat and sauce, and similar products. “Spaghetti with Meatballs and Sauce” and “Spaghetti with Meat and Sauce,” and similar products shall contain not less than...

Analytical similarity assessment of rituximab biosimilar CT-P10 to reference medicinal product.

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Kyoung Hoon; Lee, Jihun; Bae, Jin Soo; Kim, Yeon Jung; Kang, Hyun Ah; Kim, Sung Hwan; Lee, So Jung; Lim, Ki Jung; Lee, Jung Woo; Jung, Soon Kwan; Chang, Shin Jae

2018-04-01

CT-P10 (Truxima™) was recently approved as the world's first rituximab biosimilar product in the European Union (EU) and South Korea. To demonstrate biosimilarity of CT-P10 with the reference medicinal product (RMP), extensive 3-way similarity assessment has been conducted between CT-P10, EU-Rituximab and US-Rituximab, focusing on the physicochemical and biological quality attributes. A multitude of state-of-the-art analyses revealed that CT-P10 has identical primary and higher order structures compared to the original product. Purity/impurity profiles of CT-P10 measured by the levels of aggregates, fragments, non-glycosylated form and process-related impurities were also found to be comparable with those of RMPs. In terms of the post-translational modification, CT-P10 contains slightly less N-terminal pyro-glutamate variant, which has been known not to affect product efficacy or safety. Oligosaccharide profiling has revealed that, although CT-P10 contains the same conserved glycan species and relative proportion with the RMPs, the content of total afucosylated glycan in CT-P10 was slightly higher than in EU- or US-Rituximab. Nevertheless, the effect of the observed level of afucosylation in CT-P10 drug product on Fc receptor binding affinity or antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity was found to be negligible based on the spiking study with highly afucosylated sample. Arrays of biological assays representative of known and putative mechanisms of action for rituximab have shown that biological activities of CT-P10 are within the quality range of RMPs. Recent results of clinical studies have further confirmed that the CT-P10 exhibits equivalent clinical efficacy and safety profiles compared to EU- and US-Rituximab. The current 3-way similarity assessment together with clinical study results confidently demonstrate that CT-P10 is highly similar with EU- and US-Rituximab in terms of physicochemical properties, biological activities, efficacy, and safety for

A Consensus Genome-scale Reconstruction of Chinese Hamster Ovary Cell Metabolism

KAUST Repository

Hefzi, Hooman; Ang, Kok  Siong; Hanscho, Michael; Bordbar, Aarash; Ruckerbauer, David; Lakshmanan, Meiyappan; Orellana, Camila  A.; Baycin-Hizal, Deniz; Huang, Yingxiang; Ley, Daniel; Martinez, Veronica  S.; Kyriakopoulos, Sarantos; Jimé nez, Natalia  E.; Zielinski, Daniel  C.; Quek, Lake-Ee; Wulff, Tune; Arnsdorf, Johnny; Li, Shangzhong; Lee, Jae  Seong; Paglia, Giuseppe; Loira, Nicolas; Spahn, Philipp  N.; Pedersen, Lasse  E.; Gutierrez, Jahir  M.; King, Zachary  A.; Lund, Anne  Mathilde; Nagarajan, Harish; Thomas, Alex; Abdel-Haleem, Alyaa M.; Zanghellini, Juergen; Kildegaard, Helene  F.; Voldborg, Bjø rn  G.; Gerdtzen, Ziomara  P.; Betenbaugh, Michael  J.; Palsson, Bernhard  O.; Andersen, Mikael  R.; Nielsen, Lars  K.; Borth, Nicole; Lee, Dong-Yup; Lewis, Nathan  E.

2016-01-01

Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells dominate biotherapeutic protein production and are widely used in mammalian cell line engineering research. To elucidate metabolic bottlenecks in protein production and to guide cell engineering and bioprocess

American and Chinese Similarities and Differences in Defining and Valuing Creative Products

Science.gov (United States)

Lan, Lan; Kaufman, James C.

2012-01-01

This review of the literature explores how Americans and Chinese view creativity and what they expect from creative products. American and Chinese explicit beliefs about creativity (i.e., expert opinions) share many similarities. Implicit beliefs, however, show more divergence: Americans tend to value novelty and more "groundbreaking"…

Similarity of High-Resolution Tandem Mass Spectrometry Spectra of Structurally Related Micropollutants and Transformation Products

Science.gov (United States)

Schollée, Jennifer E.; Schymanski, Emma L.; Stravs, Michael A.; Gulde, Rebekka; Thomaidis, Nikolaos S.; Hollender, Juliane

2017-12-01

High-resolution tandem mass spectrometry (HRMS2) with electrospray ionization is frequently applied to study polar organic molecules such as micropollutants. Fragmentation provides structural information to confirm structures of known compounds or propose structures of unknown compounds. Similarity of HRMS2 spectra between structurally related compounds has been suggested to facilitate identification of unknown compounds. To test this hypothesis, the similarity of reference standard HRMS2 spectra was calculated for 243 pairs of micropollutants and their structurally related transformation products (TPs); for comparison, spectral similarity was also calculated for 219 pairs of unrelated compounds. Spectra were measured on Orbitrap and QTOF mass spectrometers and similarity was calculated with the dot product. The influence of different factors on spectral similarity [e.g., normalized collision energy (NCE), merging fragments from all NCEs, and shifting fragments by the mass difference of the pair] was considered. Spectral similarity increased at higher NCEs and highest similarity scores for related pairs were obtained with merged spectra including measured fragments and shifted fragments. Removal of the monoisotopic peak was critical to reduce false positives. Using a spectral similarity score threshold of 0.52, 40% of related pairs and 0% of unrelated pairs were above this value. Structural similarity was estimated with the Tanimoto coefficient and pairs with higher structural similarity generally had higher spectral similarity. Pairs where one or both compounds contained heteroatoms such as sulfur often resulted in dissimilar spectra. This work demonstrates that HRMS2 spectral similarity may indicate structural similarity and that spectral similarity can be used in the future to screen complex samples for related compounds such as micropollutants and TPs, assisting in the prioritization of non-target compounds. [Figure not available: see fulltext.

Similarities of Water-soluble Vitamin Components among Non-prescription Pharmaceutical Vitamin Products Generally Available on the Domestic Market.

Science.gov (United States)

Suzuki, Keiichiro; Kojina, Moeko; Aiba, Tetsuya

2017-01-01

Similarities among non-prescription pharmaceutical vitamin products generally available in community pharmacies were examined based on their vitamin components, and a chart was constructed to differentiate products to assist in appropriate product choice. In the analysis of the similarities, two hundred and seventy-six data entries on vitamin products were extracted from the database on the package inserts of the pharmaceutical products provided by the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency, and they were reviewed for the amounts of vitamins they contained, in which the B vitamins, or vitamin B 1 , B 2 , B 6 , B 12 , and niacin, were considered as well as vitamins C and E. Pantothenic acid and L-Cysteine that are frequently used in combination with those vitamins are also taken into consideration. The data entries were then processed by classical multi-dimensional scaling to evaluate the inter-product similarities. As a result, it was shown that the products categorized as pharmaceutical nutrients and tonics containing vitamins (NTcV) are similar to one another, reflecting the fact that they are less characteristic regarding their vitamin components. As for the products in other categories, they were generally found to be featured for their unique content of vitamin components, and thereby, each category includes products with a wide range of variation. It was also indicated that some products categorized as vitamin B 1 , B 2 , and C products are less distinguishable from those categorized as NTcV. These findings will assist pharmacists to decide on an appropriate product for a customer following consultation.

From Pandemic Preparedness to Biofuel Production: Tobacco Finds Its Biotechnology Niche in North America

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Joshua D. Powell

2015-09-01

Full Text Available In 2012 scientists funded by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA produced 10 million doses of influenza vaccine in tobacco in a milestone deadline of one month. Recently the experimental antibody cocktail Zmapp™, also produced in tobacco, has shown promise as an emergency intervention therapeutic against Ebola virus. These two examples showcase how collaborative efforts between government, private industry and academia are applying plant biotechnology to combat pathogenic agents. Opportunities now exist repurposing tobacco expression systems for exciting new applications in synthetic biology, biofuels production and industrial enzyme production. As plant-produced biotherapeutics become more mainstream, government funding agencies need to be cognizant of the idea that many plant-produced biologicals are often safer, cheaper, and just as efficacious as traditionally used expression systems.

A Consensus Genome-scale Reconstruction of Chinese Hamster Ovary Cell Metabolism

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hefzi, Hooman; Ang, Kok Siong; Hanscho, Michael

2016-01-01

Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells dominate biotherapeutic protein production and are widely used in mammalian cell line engineering research. To elucidate metabolic bottlenecks in protein production and to guide cell engineering and bioprocess optimization, we reconstructed the metabolic pathways...

9 CFR 319.309 - Beans with frankfurters in sauce, sauerkraut with wieners and juice, and similar products.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 9 Animals and Animal Products 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Beans with frankfurters in sauce... STANDARDS OF IDENTITY OR COMPOSITION Canned, Frozen, or Dehydrated Meat Food Products § 319.309 Beans with frankfurters in sauce, sauerkraut with wieners and juice, and similar products. “Beans with Frankfurters in...

Investigation of Genipin Cross-Linked Microcapsule for Oral Delivery of Live Bacterial Cells and Other Biotherapeutics: Preparation and In Vitro Analysis in Simulated Human Gastrointestinal Model

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hongmei Chen

2010-01-01

Full Text Available Oral therapy utilizing engineered microorganisms has shown promise in the treatment of many diseases. By microencapsulation, viable cells can overcome the harsh gastrointestinal (GI environment and secrete needed therapeutics into the gut. These engineered cells should be encased without escaping into the GI tract for safety concerns, thus robust microcapsule membrane is requisite. This paper examined the GI performance of a novel microcapsule membrane using a dynamic simulated human GI model. Results showed that the genipin cross-linked alginate-chitosan (GCAC microcapsules possessed strong resistance to structural disintegration in the simulated GI environment. Leakage of encapsulated high molecular weight dextran, a model material to be protected during the simulated GI transit, was negligible over 72 h of exposure, in contrast to considerable leakage of dextran from the non-cross-linked counterparts. These microcapsules did not alter the microflora and enzymatic activities in the simulated human colonic media. This study suggested the potential of the GCAC microcapsules for oral delivery of live microorganisms and other biotherapeutics.

Case studies on clinical evaluation of biosimilar monoclonal antibody: scientific considerations for regulatory approval.

Science.gov (United States)

Kudrin, Alex; Knezevic, Ivana; Joung, Jeewon; Kang, Hye-Na

2015-01-01

The objective of this paper is to provide considerations based on comprehensive case studies important for regulatory evaluation of monoclonal antibodies as similar biotherapeutic products (SBPs) with a special emphasis on clinical aspects. Scientific principles from WHO Guidelines on SBPs were used as a basis for the exercise. Working groups consisted of regulators, manufacturers and academia. The following topics were discussed by the working groups: clinical criteria for biosimilarity, extrapolation approach and the overall regulatory decision making process. In order to determine typical pitfalls in the design of a SBP clinical programme and evaluate the gap of knowledge, amongst different industry and regulatory stakeholders on the appraisal of the data arising from SBP clinical studies, we have presented two fictional but realistic clinical case studies. The first case consists of the fictional development programme for an infliximab SBP candidate. The second case describes clinical studies proposed for a fictional rituximab SBP candidate. In the first scenario a highly similar quality profile has been taken forward into clinical studies whereas there was an important residual difference in functional attributes for the rituximab SBP candidate. These case studies were presented at the WHO implementation workshop for the WHO guidelines on evaluation of similar biotherapeutic products held in Seoul, Republic of Korea, in May 2014. The goal was to illustrate the interpretation of the clinical data arising from studies with SBP candidates and elicit knowledge gaps in clinical assessment. This paper reflects the outcome of the exercise and discussions held in Seoul and offers an analysis of the case studies as a learning opportunity on clinical development and evaluation of SBPs. Copyright © 2014 The International Alliance for Biological Standardization. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Application of CFD in Bioprocessing: Separation of mammalian cells using disc stack centrifuge during production of biotherapeutics.

Science.gov (United States)

Shekhawat, Lalita Kanwar; Sarkar, Jayati; Gupta, Rachit; Hadpe, Sandeep; Rathore, Anurag S

2018-02-10

Centrifugation continues to be one of the most commonly used unit operations for achieving efficient harvest of the product from the mammalian cell culture broth during production of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). Since the mammalian cells are known to be shear sensitive, optimal performance of the centrifuge requires a balance between productivity and shear. In this study, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has been successfully used as a tool to facilitate efficient optimization. Multiphase Eulerian-Eulerian model coupled with Gidaspow drag model along with Eulerian-Eulerian k-ε mixture turbulence model have been used to quantify the complex hydrodynamics of the centrifuge and thus evaluate the turbulent stresses generated by the centrifugal forces. An empirical model has been developed by statistical analysis of experimentally observed cell lysis data as a function of turbulent stresses. An operating window that offers the optimal balance between high productivity, high separation efficiency, and low cell damage has been identified by use of CFD modeling. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Cortisol production rate is similarly elevated in obese women with or without the polycystic ovary syndrome.

Science.gov (United States)

Roelfsema, Ferdinand; Kok, Petra; Pereira, Alberto M; Pijl, Hanno

2010-07-01

The pituitary-adrenal axis in obesity and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is marked by increased urinary excretion of cortisol and its metabolites. It is not as yet clear whether the increased cortisol production in PCOS is related to obesity per se. We investigated 15 obese PCOS women with a body mass index of 30-54 kg/m(2) and 15 healthy obese controls (body mass index 31-60 kg/m(2)) with a regular menstrual cycle. Patients and control women underwent 24-h blood sampling at 20-min intervals. Cortisol concentrations were measured with a sensitive assay. Data were analyzed with a new deconvolution program, approximate entropy, and cosinor regression. Basal, pulsatile, and total cortisol production expressed per liter distribution volume, per square meter body surface, and as absolute amount per 24 h was similar in PCOS patients and matched healthy control women. In addition, the regularity of cortisol secretion and the diurnal properties were identical. Compared with 10 lean control women, mean cortisol production per liter distribution volume was similar in the three groups, but the total 24-h cortisol production was increased in obese control women and PCOS women. This study demonstrates equally increased cortisol production in PCOS women and obese healthy control women.

Subvisible (2-100 μm) Particle Analysis During Biotherapeutic Drug Product Development: Part 1, Considerations and Strategy.

Science.gov (United States)

Narhi, Linda O; Corvari, Vincent; Ripple, Dean C; Afonina, Nataliya; Cecchini, Irene; Defelippis, Michael R; Garidel, Patrick; Herre, Andrea; Koulov, Atanas V; Lubiniecki, Tony; Mahler, Hanns-Christian; Mangiagalli, Paolo; Nesta, Douglas; Perez-Ramirez, Bernardo; Polozova, Alla; Rossi, Mara; Schmidt, Roland; Simler, Robert; Singh, Satish; Spitznagel, Thomas M; Weiskopf, Andrew; Wuchner, Klaus

2015-06-01

Measurement and characterization of subvisible particles (defined here as those ranging in size from 2 to 100 μm), including proteinaceous and nonproteinaceous particles, is an important part of every stage of protein therapeutic development. The tools used and the ways in which the information generated is applied depends on the particular product development stage, the amount of material, and the time available for the analysis. In order to compare results across laboratories and products, it is important to harmonize nomenclature, experimental protocols, data analysis, and interpretation. In this manuscript on perspectives on subvisible particles in protein therapeutic drug products, we focus on the tools available for detection, characterization, and quantification of these species and the strategy around their application. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. and the American Pharmacists Association.

Self-similarity of high-pT hadron production in π-p and π- A collisions

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Tokarev, M.V.; Panebrattsev, Yu.A.; Skoro, G.P.; Zborovsky, I.

2002-01-01

Self-similar properties of hadron production in π - p and π - A collisions over a high-p T region are studied. The analysis if experimental data is performed in the framework of z-scaling. The scaling variable depends on the anomalous fractal dimension of the incoming pion. Its value is found to be δ π ≅ 0.1. Independence of the scaling function Ψ(z) on the collision energy is shown. A-dependence of data z-presentation confirms self-similarity of particle formation in πA collisions

49 CFR 393.118 - What are the rules for securing dressed lumber or similar building products?

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... plywood, gypsum board or other materials of similar shape. Lumber or building products which are not... the middle tier that must be secured may not exceed 6 feet about the deck of the trailer; or (ii...

Integrating Ontological Knowledge and Textual Evidence in Estimating Gene and Gene Product Similarity

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Sanfilippo, Antonio P.; Posse, Christian; Gopalan, Banu; Tratz, Stephen C.; Gregory, Michelle L.

2006-06-08

With the rising influence of the Gene On-tology, new approaches have emerged where the similarity between genes or gene products is obtained by comparing Gene Ontology code annotations associ-ated with them. So far, these approaches have solely relied on the knowledge en-coded in the Gene Ontology and the gene annotations associated with the Gene On-tology database. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that improvements to these approaches can be obtained by integrating textual evidence extracted from relevant biomedical literature.

Advanced process monitoring and feedback control to enhance cell culture process production and robustness.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, An; Tsang, Valerie Liu; Moore, Brandon; Shen, Vivian; Huang, Yao-Ming; Kshirsagar, Rashmi; Ryll, Thomas

2015-12-01

It is a common practice in biotherapeutic manufacturing to define a fixed-volume feed strategy for nutrient feeds, based on historical cell demand. However, once the feed volumes are defined, they are inflexible to batch-to-batch variations in cell growth and physiology and can lead to inconsistent productivity and product quality. In an effort to control critical quality attributes and to apply process analytical technology (PAT), a fully automated cell culture feedback control system has been explored in three different applications. The first study illustrates that frequent monitoring and automatically controlling the complex feed based on a surrogate (glutamate) level improved protein production. More importantly, the resulting feed strategy was translated into a manufacturing-friendly manual feed strategy without impact on product quality. The second study demonstrates the improved process robustness of an automated feed strategy based on online bio-capacitance measurements for cell growth. In the third study, glucose and lactate concentrations were measured online and were used to automatically control the glucose feed, which in turn changed lactate metabolism. These studies suggest that the auto-feedback control system has the potential to significantly increase productivity and improve robustness in manufacturing, with the goal of ensuring process performance and product quality consistency. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

On different forms of self similarity

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Aswathy, R.K.; Mathew, Sunil

2016-01-01

Fractal geometry is mainly based on the idea of self-similar forms. To be self-similar, a shape must able to be divided into parts that are smaller copies, which are more or less similar to the whole. There are different forms of self similarity in nature and mathematics. In this paper, some of the topological properties of super self similar sets are discussed. It is proved that in a complete metric space with two or more elements, the set of all non super self similar sets are dense in the set of all non-empty compact sub sets. It is also proved that the product of self similar sets are super self similar in product metric spaces and that the super self similarity is preserved under isometry. A characterization of super self similar sets using contracting sub self similarity is also presented. Some relevant counterexamples are provided. The concepts of exact super and sub self similarity are introduced and a necessary and sufficient condition for a set to be exact super self similar in terms of condensation iterated function systems (Condensation IFS’s) is obtained. A method to generate exact sub self similar sets using condensation IFS’s and the denseness of exact super self similar sets are also discussed.

Ribosome profiling-guided depletion of an mRNA increases cell growth rate and protein secretion

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Beuchert Kallehauge, Thomas; Li, Shangzhong; Pedersen, Lasse Ebdrup

2017-01-01

Recombinant protein production coopts the host cell machinery to provide high protein yields of industrial enzymes or biotherapeutics. However, since protein translation is energetically expensive and tightly controlled, it is unclear if highly expressed recombinant genes are translated as effici......Recombinant protein production coopts the host cell machinery to provide high protein yields of industrial enzymes or biotherapeutics. However, since protein translation is energetically expensive and tightly controlled, it is unclear if highly expressed recombinant genes are translated...... as efficiently as host genes. Furthermore, it is unclear how the high expression impacts global translation. Here, we present the first genome-wide view of protein translation in an IgG-producing CHO cell line, measured with ribosome profiling. Through this we found that our recombinant mRNAs were translated...... as efficiently as the host cell transcriptome, and sequestered up to 15% of the total ribosome occupancy. During cell culture, changes in recombinant mRNA translation were consistent with changes in transcription, demonstrating that transcript levels influence specific productivity. Using this information, we...

kWIP: The k-mer weighted inner product, a de novo estimator of genetic similarity.

Science.gov (United States)

Murray, Kevin D; Webers, Christfried; Ong, Cheng Soon; Borevitz, Justin; Warthmann, Norman

2017-09-01

Modern genomics techniques generate overwhelming quantities of data. Extracting population genetic variation demands computationally efficient methods to determine genetic relatedness between individuals (or "samples") in an unbiased manner, preferably de novo. Rapid estimation of genetic relatedness directly from sequencing data has the potential to overcome reference genome bias, and to verify that individuals belong to the correct genetic lineage before conclusions are drawn using mislabelled, or misidentified samples. We present the k-mer Weighted Inner Product (kWIP), an assembly-, and alignment-free estimator of genetic similarity. kWIP combines a probabilistic data structure with a novel metric, the weighted inner product (WIP), to efficiently calculate pairwise similarity between sequencing runs from their k-mer counts. It produces a distance matrix, which can then be further analysed and visualised. Our method does not require prior knowledge of the underlying genomes and applications include establishing sample identity and detecting mix-up, non-obvious genomic variation, and population structure. We show that kWIP can reconstruct the true relatedness between samples from simulated populations. By re-analysing several published datasets we show that our results are consistent with marker-based analyses. kWIP is written in C++, licensed under the GNU GPL, and is available from https://github.com/kdmurray91/kwip.

Exploring product and service innovation similarities and differences

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Nijssen, E.J.; Hillebrand, B.; Vermeulen, P.A.M.; Kemp, R.G.M.

2006-01-01

This paper aims to provide an initial step towards a synthesis of new service and new product development research. Using a baseline model of innovation, applicable to innovation in general, we hypothesize differential context effects between new service and product development in order to better

Experimental and in silico modelling analyses of the gene expression pathway for recombinant antibody and by-product production in NS0 cell lines.

Science.gov (United States)

Mead, Emma J; Chiverton, Lesley M; Spurgeon, Sarah K; Martin, Elaine B; Montague, Gary A; Smales, C Mark; von der Haar, Tobias

2012-01-01

Monoclonal antibodies are commercially important, high value biotherapeutic drugs used in the treatment of a variety of diseases. These complex molecules consist of two heavy chain and two light chain polypeptides covalently linked by disulphide bonds. They are usually expressed as recombinant proteins from cultured mammalian cells, which are capable of correctly modifying, folding and assembling the polypeptide chains into the native quaternary structure. Such recombinant cell lines often vary in the amounts of product produced and in the heterogeneity of the secreted products. The biological mechanisms of this variation are not fully defined. Here we have utilised experimental and modelling strategies to characterise and define the biology underpinning product heterogeneity in cell lines exhibiting varying antibody expression levels, and then experimentally validated these models. In undertaking these studies we applied and validated biochemical (rate-constant based) and engineering (nonlinear) models of antibody expression to experimental data from four NS0 cell lines with different IgG4 secretion rates. The models predict that export of the full antibody and its fragments are intrinsically linked, and cannot therefore be manipulated individually at the level of the secretory machinery. Instead, the models highlight strategies for the manipulation at the precursor species level to increase recombinant protein yields in both high and low producing cell lines. The models also highlight cell line specific limitations in the antibody expression pathway.

A novel multimodal chromatography based single step purification process for efficient manufacturing of an E. coli based biotherapeutic protein product.

Science.gov (United States)

Bhambure, Rahul; Gupta, Darpan; Rathore, Anurag S

2013-11-01

Methionine oxidized, reduced and fMet forms of a native recombinant protein product are often the critical product variants which are associated with proteins expressed as bacterial inclusion bodies in E. coli. Such product variants differ from native protein in their structural and functional aspects, and may lead to loss of biological activity and immunogenic response in patients. This investigation focuses on evaluation of multimodal chromatography for selective removal of these product variants using recombinant human granulocyte colony stimulating factor (GCSF) as the model protein. Unique selectivity in separation of closely related product variants was obtained using combined pH and salt based elution gradients in hydrophobic charge induction chromatography. Simultaneous removal of process related impurities was also achieved in flow-through leading to single step purification process for the GCSF. Results indicate that the product recovery of up to 90.0% can be obtained with purity levels of greater than 99.0%. Binding the target protein at pHproduct variants using the combined pH and salt based elution gradient and removal of the host cell impurities in flow-through are the key novel features of the developed multimodal chromatographic purification step. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Posttranslational Modifications and the Immunogenicity of Biotherapeutics

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Roy Jefferis

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Whilst the amino acid sequence of a protein is determined by its gene sequence, the final structure and function are determined by posttranslational modifications (PTMs, including quality control (QC in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER and during passage through the Golgi apparatus. These processes are species and cell specific and challenge the biopharmaceutical industry when developing a production platform for the generation of recombinant biologic therapeutics. Proteins and glycoproteins are also subject to chemical modifications (CMs both in vivo and in vitro. The individual is naturally tolerant to molecular forms of self-molecules but nonself variants can provoke an immune response with the generation of anti-drug antibodies (ADA; aggregated forms can exhibit enhanced immunogenicity and QC procedures are developed to avoid or remove them. Monoclonal antibody therapeutics (mAbs are a special case because their purpose is to bind the target, with the formation of immune complexes (ICs, a particular form of aggregate. Such ICs may be removed by phagocytic cells that have antigen presenting capacity. These considerations may frustrate the possibility of ameliorating the immunogenicity of mAbs by rigorous exclusion of aggregates from drug product. Alternate strategies for inducing immunosuppression or tolerance are discussed.

Safety of power transformers, power supplies, reactors and similar products - Part 1: General requirements and tests

CERN Document Server

International Electrotechnical Commission. Geneva

1998-01-01

This International Standard deals with safety aspects of power transformers, power supplies, reactors and similar products such as electrical, thermal and mechanical safety. This standard covers the following types of dry-type transformers, power supplies, including switch mode power supplies, and reactors, the windings of which may be encapsulated or non-encapsulated. It has the status of a group safety publication in accordance with IEC Guide 104.

Determinants of immunogenic response to protein therapeutics.

Science.gov (United States)

Singh, Satish K; Cousens, Leslie P; Alvarez, David; Mahajan, Pramod B

2012-09-01

Protein therapeutics occupy a very significant position in the biopharmaceutical market. In addition to the preclinical, clinical and post marketing challenges common to other drugs, unwanted immunogenicity is known to affect efficacy and/or safety of most biotherapeutics. A standard set of immunogenicity risk factors are routinely used to inform monitoring strategies in clinical studies. A number of in-silico, in vivo and in vitro approaches have also been employed to predict immunogenicity of biotherapeutics, but with limited success. Emerging data also indicates the role of immune tolerance mechanisms and impact of several product-related factors on modulating host immune responses. Thus, a comprehensive discussion of the impact of innate and adaptive mechanisms and molecules involved in induction of host immune responses on immunogenicity of protein therapeutics is needed. A detailed understanding of these issues is essential in order to fully exploit the therapeutic potential of this class of drugs. This Roundtable Session was designed to provide a common platform for discussing basic immunobiological and pharmacological issues related to the role of biotherapeutic-associated risk factors, as well as host immune system in immunogenicity against protein therapeutics. The session included overview presentations from three speakers, followed by a panel discussion with audience participation. Copyright © 2012. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Large revealing similarity in multihadron production in nuclear and particle collisions

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Mishra, Aditya Nath; Sahoo, Raghunath; Sarkisyan, Edward K.G.; Sakharov, Alexander S.; )

2016-01-01

The dependencies of charged particle pseudorapidity density and transverse energy pseudorapidity density at midrapidity as well as of charged particle total multiplicity on the collision energy and on the number of nucleon participants, or centrality, measured in nucleus-nucleus collisions are studied in the energy range spanning a few GeV to a few TeV per nucleon. The model in which the multiparticle production is driven by the dissipating effective energy of participants is considered. The model extends the earlier proposed approach, combining the constituent quark picture together with Landau relativistic hydrodynamics shown to interrelate the measurements from different types of collisions. Within this model, the dependence of the charged particle pseudorapidity density and transverse energy pseudorapidity density at midrapidity on the number of participants in heavy-ion collisions are found to be well described in terms of the effective energy defined as a centrality-dependent fraction of the collision energy. For both variables the effective energy approach reveals a similarity in the energy dependence obtained for the most central collisions and centrality data in the entire available energy range

New product forecasting demand by using neural networks and similar product analysis

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alfonso T. Sarmiento

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Esta investigación presenta una metodología para pronosticar productos nuevos que combina el pronóstico de productos similares. La parte cuantitativa del método usa una red neuronal artificial para calcular el pronóstico de cada producto similar. Estos pronósticos individuales son combinados usando una técnica cualitativa basada en un factor que mide la similaridad entre los productos análogos y el producto nuevo. Para ilustrar la metodología se presenta un caso de estudio de dos grandes compañías multinacionales en el sector de alimentos. Los resultados de este estudio mostraron en el 86 por ciento de los casos analizados pronósticos más exactos usando el método propuesto.

Formulation and evaluation of a montelukast sodium orally disintegrating tablet with a similar dissolution profile as the marketed product.

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Yong; Feng, Tingting; Li, Yong; Du, Bin; Weng, Weiyu

2017-03-01

A major challenge of orally disintegrating tablet (ODT) development is predicting its bioequivalence to its corresponding marketed product. Therefore, comparing ODT dissolution profiles to those of the corresponding marketed product is very important. The objective of this study was to develop a 5.2-mg montelukast sodium (MS) ODT with a similar dissolution profile to that of the marketed chewable tablet. Dissolution profiles were examined in different media to screen each formulation. We found that MS dissolution from ODTs in acidic medium heavily depended on manufacturing methods. All MS ODTs prepared using direct compression rapidly disintegrated in acidic medium. However, dispersed MS powders aggregated into sticky masses, resulting in slow dissolution. In contrast, MS ODTs prepared using wet granulation had much faster dissolution rates in acidic medium with no obvious aggregation. Additionally, the optimized formulation, prepared using wet granulation, displayed similar dissolution profiles to the marketed reference in all four types of media examined (f 2  >   50). The in vitro disintegration time of the optimized ODT was 9.5 ± 2.4 s, which meets FDA requirements. In conclusion, the wet granulation preparation method of MS ODTs resulted in a product with equivalent dissolution profiles as those of the marketed product.

Narrative Production in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Children With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) : Similarities and Differences

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Kuijper, Sanne J. M.; Hartman, Catharina A.; Bogaerds-Hazenberg, S. T.; Hendriks, Petra

The present study focuses on the similarities and differences in language production between children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In addition, we investigated whether Theory of Mind (ToM), working memory, and response

Ocean Acidification Experiments in Large-Scale Mesocosms Reveal Similar Dynamics of Dissolved Organic Matter Production and Biotransformation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Maren Zark

2017-09-01

similar succession patterns for individual compound pools during a phytoplankton bloom and subsequent accumulation of these compounds were observed. The similar behavior of DOM production and biotransformation during and following a phytoplankton bloom irrespective of plankton community composition and CO2 treatment provides novel insights into general dynamics of the marine DOM pool.

Assessing Analytical Similarity of Proposed Amgen Biosimilar ABP 501 to Adalimumab.

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Jennifer; Eris, Tamer; Li, Cynthia; Cao, Shawn; Kuhns, Scott

2016-08-01

ABP 501 is being developed as a biosimilar to adalimumab. Comprehensive comparative analytical characterization studies have been conducted and completed. The objective of this study was to assess analytical similarity between ABP 501 and two adalimumab reference products (RPs), licensed by the United States Food and Drug Administration (adalimumab [US]) and authorized by the European Union (adalimumab [EU]), using state-of-the-art analytical methods. Comprehensive analytical characterization incorporating orthogonal analytical techniques was used to compare products. Physicochemical property comparisons comprised the primary structure related to amino acid sequence and post-translational modifications including glycans; higher-order structure; primary biological properties mediated by target and receptor binding; product-related substances and impurities; host-cell impurities; general properties of the finished drug product, including strength and formulation; subvisible and submicron particles and aggregates; and forced thermal degradation. ABP 501 had the same amino acid sequence and similar post-translational modification profiles compared with adalimumab RPs. Primary structure, higher-order structure, and biological activities were similar for the three products. Product-related size and charge variants and aggregate and particle levels were also similar. ABP 501 had very low residual host-cell protein and DNA. The finished ABP 501 drug product has the same strength with regard to protein concentration and fill volume as adalimumab RPs. ABP 501 and the RPs had a similar stability profile both in normal storage and thermal stress conditions. Based on the comprehensive analytical similarity assessment, ABP 501 was found to be similar to adalimumab with respect to physicochemical and biological properties.

9 CFR 319.181 - Cheesefurters and similar products.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... AGRICULTURE AGENCY ORGANIZATION AND TERMINOLOGY; MANDATORY MEAT AND POULTRY PRODUCTS INSPECTION AND VOLUNTARY... frankfurters except that they contain sufficient cheese to give definite characteristics to the finished... combination of fat and added water, and no more than 30 percent fat and shall comply with the other provisions...

Narrative production in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): Similarities and differences.

Science.gov (United States)

Kuijper, Sanne J M; Hartman, Catharina A; Bogaerds-Hazenberg, Suzanne T M; Hendriks, Petra

2017-01-01

The present study focuses on the similarities and differences in language production between children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In addition, we investigated whether Theory of Mind (ToM), working memory, and response inhibition are associated with language production. Narratives, produced by 106 Dutch-speaking children (36 with ASD, 34 with ADHD, and 36 typically developing) aged 6 to 12 during ADOS assessment, were examined on several linguistic measures: verbal productivity, speech fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical semantics, and discourse pragmatics. Children were tested on ToM, working memory, and response inhibition and parents filled in the Children's Communication Checklist (CCC-2). Gold-standard diagnostic measures (Autism Diagnostic Observation Schema [ADOS], Autism Diagnostic Interview Revised [ADI-R], and the Parent Interview for Child Symptoms [PICS]) were administered to all children to confirm diagnosis. Regarding similarities, both clinical groups showed impairments in narrative performance relative to typically developing children. These were confirmed by the CCC-2. These impairments were not only present on pragmatic measures, such as the inability to produce a narrative in a coherent and cohesive way, but also on syntactic complexity and their production of repetitions. As for differences, children with ADHD but not children with ASD showed problems in their choice of referring expressions and speech fluency. ToM and working memory performance but not response inhibition were associated with many narrative skills, suggesting that these cognitive mechanisms explain some of the impairments in language production. We conclude that children with ASD and children with ADHD manifest multiple and diverse language production problems, which may partly relate to their problems in ToM and working memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Irreversible thermodynamics, parabolic law and self-similar state in grain growth

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Rios, P.R.

2004-01-01

The formalism of the thermodynamic theory of irreversible processes is applied to grain growth to investigate the nature of the self-similar state and its corresponding parabolic law. Grain growth does not reach a steady state in the sense that the entropy production remains constant. However, the entropy production can be written as a product of two factors: a scale factor that tends to zero for long times and a scaled entropy production. It is suggested that the parabolic law and the self-similar state may be associated with the minimum of this scaled entropy production. This result implies that the parabolic law and the self-similar state have a sound irreversible thermodynamical basis

Cholesterol-Lowering Probiotics as Potential Biotherapeutics for Metabolic Diseases

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Manoj Kumar

2012-01-01

Full Text Available Cardiovascular diseases are one of the major causes of deaths in adults in the western world. Elevated levels of certain blood lipids have been reported to be the principal cause of cardiovascular disease and other disabilities in developed countries. Several animal and clinical trials have shown a positive association between cholesterol levels and the risks of coronary heart disease. Current dietary strategies for the prevention of cardiovascular disease advocate adherence to low-fat/low-saturated-fat diets. Although there is no doubt that, in experimental conditions, low-fat diets offer an effective means of reducing blood cholesterol concentrations on a population basis, these appear to be less effective, largely due to poor compliance, attributed to low palatability and acceptability of these diets to the consumers. Due to the low consumer compliance, attempts have been made to identify other dietary components that can reduce blood cholesterol levels. Supplementation of diet with fermented dairy products or lactic acid bacteria containing dairy products has shown the potential to reduce serum cholesterol levels. Various approaches have been used to alleviate this issue, including the use of probiotics, especially Bifidobacterium spp. and Lactobacillus spp.. Probiotics, the living microorganisms that confer health benefits on the host when administered in adequate amounts, have received much attention on their proclaimed health benefits which include improvement in lactose intolerance, increase in natural resistance to infectious disease in gastrointestinal tract, suppression of cancer, antidiabetic, reduction in serum cholesterol level, and improved digestion. In addition, there are numerous reports on cholesterol removal ability of probiotics and their hypocholesterolemic effects. Several possible mechanisms for cholesterol removal by probiotics are assimilation of cholesterol by growing cells, binding of cholesterol to cellular surface

The Curious Case of the "Refrigerator-TV": Similarity and Hybridization

Science.gov (United States)

Gibbert, Michael; Hampton, James A.; Estes, Zachary; Mazursky, David

2012-01-01

This article examines the role of similarity in the hybridization of concepts, focusing on hybrid products as an applied test case. Hybrid concepts found in natural language, such as "singer songwriter," typically combine similar concepts, whereas dissimilar concepts rarely form hybrids. The hybridization of dissimilar concepts in products such as…

Coating of Biomaterial Scaffolds with the Collagen-Mimetic Peptide GFOGER for Bone Defect Repair

OpenAIRE

Wojtowicz, Abigail M.; Shekaran, Asha; Oest, Megan E.; Dupont, Kenneth M.; Templeman, Kellie L.; Hutmacher, Dietmar W.; Guldberg, Robert E.; García, Andrés J.

2009-01-01

Healing large bone defects and non-unions remains a significant clinical problem. Current treatments, consisting of auto- and allografts, are limited by donor supply and morbidity, insufficient bioactivity and risk of infection. Biotherapeutics, including cells, genes and proteins, represent promising alternative therapies, but these strategies are limited by technical roadblocks to biotherapeutic delivery, cell sourcing, high cost, and regulatory hurdles. In the present study, the collagen-m...

Driving clinical study efficiency by using a productivity breakdown model: comparative evaluation of a global clinical study and a similar Japanese study.

Science.gov (United States)

Takahashi, K; Sengoku, S; Kimura, H

2011-02-01

A fundamental management imperative of pharmaceutical companies is to contain surging costs of developing and launching drugs globally. Clinical studies are a research and development (R&D) cost driver. The objective of this study was to develop a productivity breakdown model, or a key performance indicator (KPI) tree, for an entire clinical study and to use it to compare a global clinical study with a similar Japanese study. We, thereby, hope to identify means of improving study productivity. We developed the new clinical study productivity breakdown model, covering operational aspects and cost factors. Elements for improving clinical study productivity were assessed from a management viewpoint by comparing empirical tracking data from a global clinical study with a Japanese study with similar protocols. The following unique and material differences, beyond simple international difference in cost of living, that could affect the efficiency of future clinical trials were identified: (i) more frequent site visits in the Japanese study, (ii) head counts at the Japanese study sites more than double those of the global study and (iii) a shorter enrollment time window of about a third that of the global study at the Japanese study sites. We identified major differences in the performance of the two studies. These findings demonstrate the potential of the KPI tree for improving clinical study productivity. Trade-offs, such as those between reduction in head count at study sites and expansion of the enrollment time window, must be considered carefully. © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Self-similarity of proton spin and asymmetry of jet production

Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

Tokarev, M. V.; Zborovský, Imrich

2015-01-01

Roč. 12, č. 2 (2015), s. 214-220 ISSN 1547-4771 R&D Projects: GA MŠk LG14004 Institutional support: RVO:61389005 Keywords : asymmetry * high energy * jets * polarization * proton-proton collisions * Self-similarity Subject RIV: BE - Theoretical Physics

The production and perception of emotionally expressive walking sounds: similarities between musical performance and everyday motor activity.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bruno L Giordano

Full Text Available Several studies have investigated the encoding and perception of emotional expressivity in music performance. A relevant question concerns how the ability to communicate emotions in music performance is acquired. In accordance with recent theories on the embodiment of emotion, we suggest here that both the expression and recognition of emotion in music might at least in part rely on knowledge about the sounds of expressive body movements. We test this hypothesis by drawing parallels between musical expression of emotions and expression of emotions in sounds associated with a non-musical motor activity: walking. In a combined production-perception design, two experiments were conducted, and expressive acoustical features were compared across modalities. An initial performance experiment tested for similar feature use in walking sounds and music performance, and revealed that strong similarities exist. Features related to sound intensity, tempo and tempo regularity were identified as been used similarly in both domains. Participants in a subsequent perception experiment were able to recognize both non-emotional and emotional properties of the sound-generating walkers. An analysis of the acoustical correlates of behavioral data revealed that variations in sound intensity, tempo, and tempo regularity were likely used to recognize expressed emotions. Taken together, these results lend support the motor origin hypothesis for the musical expression of emotions.

Effective Results Analysis for the Similar Software Products’ Orthogonality

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ion Ivan

2009-10-01

Full Text Available It is defined the concept of similar software. There are established conditions of archiving the software components. It is carried out the orthogonality evaluation and the correlation between the orthogonality and the complexity of the homogenous software components is analyzed. Shall proceed to build groups of similar software products, belonging to the orthogonality intervals. There are presented in graphical form the results of the analysis. There are detailed aspects of the functioning of the software product allocated for the orthogonality.

27 CFR 31.41 - Clubs or similar organizations.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... therefor and such organization subsequently recoups those costs. (b) Compliance with the registration and... 27 Alcohol, Tobacco Products and Firearms 1 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Clubs or similar organizations. 31.41 Section 31.41 Alcohol, Tobacco Products and Firearms ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO TAX AND TRADE...

Analytical and functional similarity of Amgen biosimilar ABP 215 to bevacizumab.

Science.gov (United States)

Seo, Neungseon; Polozova, Alla; Zhang, Mingxuan; Yates, Zachary; Cao, Shawn; Li, Huimin; Kuhns, Scott; Maher, Gwendolyn; McBride, Helen J; Liu, Jennifer

ABP 215 is a biosimilar product to bevacizumab. Bevacizumab acts by binding to vascular endothelial growth factor A, inhibiting endothelial cell proliferation and new blood vessel formation, thereby leading to tumor vasculature normalization. The ABP 215 analytical similarity assessment was designed to assess the structural and functional similarity of ABP 215 and bevacizumab sourced from both the United States (US) and the European Union (EU). Similarity assessment was also made between the US- and EU-sourced bevacizumab to assess the similarity between the two products. The physicochemical properties and structural similarity of ABP 215 and bevacizumab were characterized using sensitive state-of-the-art analytical techniques capable of detecting small differences in product attributes. ABP 215 has the same amino acid sequence and exhibits similar post-translational modification profiles compared to bevacizumab. The functional similarity assessment employed orthogonal assays designed to interrogate all expected biological activities, including those known to affect the mechanisms of action for ABP 215 and bevacizumab. More than 20 batches of bevacizumab (US) and bevacizumab (EU), and 13 batches of ABP 215 representing unique drug substance lots were assessed for similarity. The large dataset allows meaningful comparisons and garners confidence in the overall conclusion for the analytical similarity assessment of ABP 215 to both US- and EU-sourced bevacizumab. The structural and purity attributes, and biological properties of ABP 215 are demonstrated to be highly similar to those of bevacizumab.

Animal cell cultures: recent achievements and perspectives in the production of biopharmaceuticals.

Science.gov (United States)

Butler, Michael

2005-08-01

There has been a rapid increase in the number and demand for approved biopharmaceuticals produced from animal cell culture processes over the last few years. In part, this has been due to the efficacy of several humanized monoclonal antibodies that are required at large doses for therapeutic use. There have also been several identifiable advances in animal cell technology that has enabled efficient biomanufacture of these products. Gene vector systems allow high specific protein expression and some minimize the undesirable process of gene silencing that may occur in prolonged culture. Characterization of cellular metabolism and physiology has enabled the design of fed-batch and perfusion bioreactor processes that has allowed a significant improvement in product yield, some of which are now approaching 5 g/L. Many of these processes are now being designed in serum-free and animal-component-free media to ensure that products are not contaminated with the adventitious agents found in bovine serum. There are several areas that can be identified that could lead to further improvement in cell culture systems. This includes the down-regulation of apoptosis to enable prolonged cell survival under potentially adverse conditions. The characterization of the critical parameters of glycosylation should enable process control to reduce the heterogeneity of glycoforms so that production processes are consistent. Further improvement may also be made by the identification of glycoforms with enhanced biological activity to enhance clinical efficacy. The ability to produce the ever-increasing number of biopharmaceuticals by animal cell culture is dependent on sufficient bioreactor capacity in the industry. A recent shortfall in available worldwide culture capacity has encouraged commercial activity in contract manufacturing operations. However, some analysts indicate that this still may not be enough and that future manufacturing demand may exceed production capacity as the number

A multi-method approach toward de novo glycan characterization: a Man-5 case study.

Science.gov (United States)

Prien, Justin M; Prater, Bradley D; Cockrill, Steven L

2010-05-01

Regulatory agencies' expectations for biotherapeutic approval are becoming more stringent with regard to product characterization, where minor species as low as 0.1% of a given profile are typically identified. The mission of this manuscript is to demonstrate a multi-method approach toward de novo glycan characterization and quantitation, including minor species at or approaching the 0.1% benchmark. Recently, unexpected isomers of the Man(5)GlcNAc(2) (M(5)) were reported (Prien JM, Ashline DJ, Lapadula AJ, Zhang H, Reinhold VN. 2009. The high mannose glycans from bovine ribonuclease B isomer characterization by ion trap mass spectrometry (MS). J Am Soc Mass Spectrom. 20:539-556). In the current study, quantitative analysis of these isomers found in commercial M(5) standard demonstrated that they are in low abundance (2-aminobenzoic acid to detect and chromatographically resolve multiple M(5) isomers in bovine ribonuclease B. With this multi-method approach, we have the capabilities to comprehensively characterize a biotherapeutic's glycan array in a de novo manner, including structural isomers at >/=0.1% of the total chromatographic peak area.

The Effect of Comparatively-Framed versus Similarity-Framed E-Cigarette and Snus Print Ads on Young Adults' Ad and Product Perceptions.

Science.gov (United States)

Banerjee, Smita C; Greene, Kathryn; Li, Yuelin; Ostroff, Jamie S

2016-07-01

This study examined the effects of comparative-framing [C-F; ads highlighting differences between the advertised product and conventional cigarettes and/or smokeless tobacco products] versus similarity-framing (S-F; ads highlighting congruence with conventional cigarettes and/or smokeless tobacco products) in e-cigarette and snus ads on young adult smokers' and non-smokers' ad- and product-related perceptions. One thousand fifty one (1,051) young adults (18-24 years; 76% women; 50% smokers) from existing consumer panels were recruited in a within-subjects quasi-experiment. Each participant viewed 4 online advertisements, varied by tobacco product type (e-cigarette or snus) and ad framing (C-F or S-F). The dependent measures for this study were ad-related (ad perceptions, ad credibility) and product-related perceptions (absolute and comparative risk perceptions, product appeal, and product use intentions). Former and current smokers rated C-F ads as more persuasive than S-F ads, as evidenced by favorable ad perceptions and high product use intentions. Former and current smokers also rated e-cigarette ads with more favorable ad perceptions, low absolute and comparative risk perceptions, high product appeal, and high product use intentions as compared to snus ads. However, the effect sizes of the significant differences are less than.2, indicating small magnitude of difference between the study variables. Unless FDA regulates e-cig and snus advertising, there is a potential of decreasing risk perceptions and increasing use of e-cigs among young adults. Further research on implicit/explicit comparative claims in e-cigarettes and snus advertisements that encourage risk misperceptions is recommended.

Two Echelon Supply Chain Integrated Inventory Model for Similar Products: A Case Study

Science.gov (United States)

Parjane, Manoj Baburao; Dabade, Balaji Marutirao; Gulve, Milind Bhaskar

2017-06-01

The purpose of this paper is to develop a mathematical model towards minimization of total cost across echelons in a multi-product supply chain environment. The scenario under consideration is a two-echelon supply chain system with one manufacturer, one retailer and M products. The retailer faces independent Poisson demand for each product. The retailer and the manufacturer are closely coupled in the sense that the information about any depletion in the inventory of a product at a retailer's end is immediately available to the manufacturer. Further, stock-out is backordered at the retailer's end. Thus the costs incurred at the retailer's end are the holding costs and the backorder costs. The manufacturer has only one processor which is time shared among the M products. Production changeover from one product to another entails a fixed setup cost and a fixed set up time. Each unit of a product has a production time. Considering the cost components, and assuming transportation time and cost to be negligible, the objective of the study is to minimize the expected total cost considering both the manufacturer and retailer. In the process two aspects are to be defined. Firstly, every time a product is taken up for production, how much of it (production batch size, q) should be produced. Considering a large value of q favors the manufacturer while a small value of q suits the retailers. Secondly, for a given batch size q, at what level of retailer's inventory (production queuing point), the batch size S of a product be taken up for production by the manufacturer. A higher value of S incurs more holding cost whereas a lower value of S increases the chance of backorder. A tradeoff between the holding and backorder cost must be taken into consideration while choosing an optimal value of S. It may be noted that due to multiple products and single processor, a product `taken' up for production may not get the processor immediately, and may have to wait in a queue. The `S

The Effect of Comparatively-Framed versus Similarity-Framed E-Cigarette and Snus Print Ads on Young Adults’ Ad and Product Perceptions

Science.gov (United States)

Banerjee, Smita C.; Greene, Kathryn; Li, Yuelin; Ostroff, Jamie S.

2016-01-01

Objectives This study examined the effects of comparative-framing [C-F; ads highlighting differences between the advertised product and conventional cigarettes and/or smokeless tobacco products] versus similarity-framing (S-F; ads highlighting congruence with conventional cigarettes and/or smokeless tobacco products) in e-cigarette and snus ads on young adult smokers’ and non-smokers’ ad- and product-related perceptions. Methods One thousand fifty one (1,051) young adults (18–24 years; 76% women; 50% smokers) from existing consumer panels were recruited in a within-subjects quasi-experiment. Each participant viewed 4 online advertisements, varied by tobacco product type (e-cigarette or snus) and ad framing (C-F or S-F). The dependent measures for this study were ad-related (ad perceptions, ad credibility) and product-related perceptions (absolute and comparative risk perceptions, product appeal, and product use intentions). Results Former and current smokers rated C-F ads as more persuasive than S-F ads, as evidenced by favorable ad perceptions and high product use intentions. Former and current smokers also rated e-cigarette ads with more favorable ad perceptions, low absolute and comparative risk perceptions, high product appeal, and high product use intentions as compared to snus ads. However, the effect sizes of the significant differences are less than.2, indicating small magnitude of difference between the study variables. Conclusions Unless FDA regulates e-cig and snus advertising, there is a potential of decreasing risk perceptions and increasing use of e-cigs among young adults. Further research on implicit/explicit comparative claims in e-cigarettes and snus advertisements that encourage risk misperceptions is recommended. PMID:28042597

Bilateral Trade Flows and Income Distribution Similarity

Science.gov (United States)

2016-01-01

Current models of bilateral trade neglect the effects of income distribution. This paper addresses the issue by accounting for non-homothetic consumer preferences and hence investigating the role of income distribution in the context of the gravity model of trade. A theoretically justified gravity model is estimated for disaggregated trade data (Dollar volume is used as dependent variable) using a sample of 104 exporters and 108 importers for 1980–2003 to achieve two main goals. We define and calculate new measures of income distribution similarity and empirically confirm that greater similarity of income distribution between countries implies more trade. Using distribution-based measures as a proxy for demand similarities in gravity models, we find consistent and robust support for the hypothesis that countries with more similar income-distributions trade more with each other. The hypothesis is also confirmed at disaggregated level for differentiated product categories. PMID:27137462

Patent holdings of US biotherapeutic companies in major markets.

Science.gov (United States)

Sebastian, Teena E; Yerram, Chandra Bindu; Saberwal, Gayatri

2009-05-01

In previous studies we examined the (United States, US) patent holdings of 109 largely North American biotech companies developing therapeutics that, in particular, have an interest in discovery stage science. There appears little correlation between the number of patents and the number of products of individual companies. Here we quantified and compared the 103 US-headquartered companies' patent holdings in Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan and the US. The companies demonstrate variable and surprising patterns of patent holdings across these countries or regions. For most companies, patent holdings are not in proportion to the importance of the country as a biotech or pharma market. These results have implications for the patenting strategies of small biotech companies involved in drug discovery.

Evaluating the effect of annotation size on measures of semantic similarity

KAUST Repository

Kulmanov, Maxat

2017-02-13

Background: Ontologies are widely used as metadata in biological and biomedical datasets. Measures of semantic similarity utilize ontologies to determine how similar two entities annotated with classes from ontologies are, and semantic similarity is increasingly applied in applications ranging from diagnosis of disease to investigation in gene networks and functions of gene products.

A newly isolated probiotic Enterococcus faecalis strain from vagina microbiota enhances apoptosis of human cancer cells.

Science.gov (United States)

Nami, Y; Abdullah, N; Haghshenas, B; Radiah, D; Rosli, R; Yari Khosroushahi, A

2014-08-01

This study aimed to describe probiotic properties and bio-therapeutic effects of newly isolated Enterococcus faecalis from the human vaginal tract. The Enterococcus faecalis strain was originally isolated from the vaginal microbiota of Iranian women and was molecularly identified using 16SrDNA gene sequencing. Some biochemical methodologies were preliminarily used to characterize the probiotic potential of Ent. faecalis, including antibiotic susceptibility, antimicrobial activity, as well as acid and bile resistance. The bio-therapeutic effects of this strain's secreted metabolites on four human cancer cell lines (AGS, HeLa, MCF-7 and HT-29) and one normal cell line (HUVEC) were evaluated by cytotoxicity assay and apoptosis scrutiny. The characterization results demonstrated into the isolated bacteria strain revealed probiotic properties, such as antibiotic susceptibility, antimicrobial activity and resistance under conditions similar to those in the gastrointestinal tract. Results of bio-therapeutic efficacy assessments illustrated acceptable apoptotic effects on four human cancer cell lines and negligible side effects on assayed normal cell line. Our findings revealed that the apoptotic effect of secreted metabolites mainly depended on proteins secreted by Ent. faecalis on different cancer cells. These proteins can induce the apoptosis of cancer cells. The metabolites produced by this vaginal Ent. faecalis strain can be used as alternative pharmaceutical compounds with promising therapeutic indices because they are not cytotoxic to normal mammalian cells. Accordingly, the physicochemical, structural and functional properties of the secreted anticancer substances should be further investigated before using them as anticancer therapeutics. This study aim to screen total bacterial secreted metabolites as a wealthy source to find the new active compounds to introduce as anticancer therapeutics in the future. © 2014 The Society for Applied Microbiology.

Propriedades tecnológicas e sensoriais de produto similar ao tofu obtido pela adição de soro de leite ao extrato de soja Sensorial and technologic properties of product similar to tofu obtained with whey and soymilk addiction

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sueli Ciabotti

2009-06-01

Full Text Available Objetivou-se neste trabalho verificar a viabilidade da substituição de parte do extrato de soja por soro de leite na obtenção de um produto similar ao tofu, coagulado com adição de ácido lático e glucona-δ-lactona, quanto aos aspectos tecnológicos e sensoriais. Foram obtidos produtos, elaborados a partir de extratos de soja, adicionados de soro proveniente da elaboração do queijo Mussarela. Foram utilizadas três diferentes combinações da mistura extrato de soja (ES e soro de leite (SL 40: 60; 30: 70; 20: 80, as quais sofreram ações dos coagulantes glucona-δ-lactona (GDL e ácido lático (AL isoladamente. Observou-se que o teor de umidade dos produtos elaborados com glucona-δ-lactona foi mais elevado (p This work aimed to verify the sensorial, technological viability of replacing part of soy milk extract with whey to obtain a product similar to tofu curdled by lactic acid and glucone-δ-lactone. Some products were obtained using soy milk extract and whey from the production of mozzarella cheese. Three different combinations of a mixture of soy milk extract and whey were used (40: 60; 30: 70; 20: 80, all of which were curdled with glucone-d-lactone and lactic acid separately. Products prepared with glucone-δ-lactone presented a higher moisture content (p < 0.05 and an increased crop yield. The products made with lactic acid were richer in protein. Curdling with lactic acid resulted in more firmness, cohesiveness, gumminess, and chewiness to the products. Analyzing the color, the "L" values (luminosity of 20: 80 ratio were higher, and the yellow "b" predominated in the products with a higher proportion of soy milk. The product with better acceptance was the one with 40: 60 ratio (soy milk and whey respectively obtained with the addition of glucone-δ-lactone. The use of glucone-δ-lactone resulted in a better yield, texture characteristics, and acceptability.

9 CFR 318.12 - Manufacture of dog food or similar uninspected article at official establishments.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 9 Animals and Animal Products 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Manufacture of dog food or similar... ESTABLISHMENTS; REINSPECTION AND PREPARATION OF PRODUCTS General § 318.12 Manufacture of dog food or similar uninspected article at official establishments. (a) When dog food, or similar uninspected article is...

Comparison of productive and carcass traits and economic value of lines selected for different criteria, slaughtered at similar weights

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

K. Szendrő

2016-03-01

Full Text Available The aim of the experiment was to compare 3 genetic groups, slaughtered at similar weights, to examine their productive and carcass traits and economic value. Three lines of the Pannon Breeding Programme, selected for different criteria, were examined in the experiment. Pannon Ka (PKa, maternal line does were inseminated with semen of PKa, Pannon White (PWhite or Pannon Large (PLarge, terminal line bucks. The kits (PKa×PKa, PWhite×PKa, PLarge×PKa; n=60 in each genetic group were weaned at 35 d of age and reared until 88, 83 and 79, respectively, when they reached similar body weights for slaughtering (2.8 kg. The weight gain of PLarge×PKa was the largest (51.0 g/d and that of PKa×PKa was the smallest (47.2 g/d, while PWhite×PKa (41.8 g/d was intermediate (P<0.001. Difference was found in feed conversion ratio between weaning and the age of slaughter  PKa×PKa: 3.03 respect to PWhite×PKa: 2.75 and PLarge×PKa: 2.66; , P<0.05. Dressing out percentage and ratio of hind part to reference carcass of PWhite×PKa, PLarge×PKa and PKa×PKa were 62.4 and 37.7, 61.8 and 37.5, 61.3 and 36.8%, respectively (P<0.01. Results show that PLarge×PKa rabbits were able to exceed the average economic indicators compared to other groups. It may be concluded that the production performance of growing rabbits was affected by the adult weight, but the carcass traits were influenced by the computer tomography (CT-based selection.

Similarity of Ferrosilicon Submerged Arc Furnaces With Different Geometrical Parameters

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Machulec B.

2017-12-01

Full Text Available In order to determine reasons of unsatisfactory production output regarding one of the 12 MVA furnaces, a comparative analysis with a furnace of higher power that showed a markedly better production output was performed. For comparison of ferrosilicon furnaces with different geometrical parameters and transformer powers, the theory of physical similarity was applied. Geometrical, electrical and thermal parameters of the reaction zones are included in the comparative analysis. For furnaces with different geometrical parameters, it is important to ensure the same temperature conditions of the reaction zones. Due to diverse mechanisms of heat generation, different criteria for determination of thermal and electrical similarity for the upper and lower reaction zones were assumed contrary to other publications. The parameter c3 (Westly was assumed the similarity criterion for the upper furnace zones where heat is generated as a result of resistive heating while the parameter J1 (Jaccard was assumed the similarity criterion for the lower furnace zones where heat is generated due to arc radiation.

Quick generation of Raman spectroscopy based in-process glucose control to influence biopharmaceutical protein product quality during mammalian cell culture.

Science.gov (United States)

Berry, Brandon N; Dobrowsky, Terrence M; Timson, Rebecca C; Kshirsagar, Rashmi; Ryll, Thomas; Wiltberger, Kelly

2016-01-01

Mitigating risks to biotherapeutic protein production processes and products has driven the development of targeted process analytical technology (PAT); however implementing PAT during development without significantly increasing program timelines can be difficult. The development of a monoclonal antibody expressed in a Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell line via fed-batch processing presented an opportunity to demonstrate capabilities of altering percent glycated protein product. Glycation is caused by pseudo-first order, non-enzymatic reaction of a reducing sugar with an amino group. Glucose is the highest concentration reducing sugar in the chemically defined media (CDM), thus a strategy controlling glucose in the production bioreactor was developed utilizing Raman spectroscopy for feedback control. Raman regions for glucose were determined by spiking studies in water and CDM. Calibration spectra were collected during 8 bench scale batches designed to capture a wide glucose concentration space. Finally, a PLS model capable of translating Raman spectra to glucose concentration was built using the calibration spectra and spiking study regions. Bolus feeding in mammalian cell culture results in wide glucose concentration ranges. Here we describe the development of process automation enabling glucose setpoint control. Glucose-free nutrient feed was fed daily, however glucose stock solution was fed as needed according to online Raman measurements. Two feedback control conditions were executed where glucose was controlled at constant low concentration or decreased stepwise throughout. Glycation was reduced from ∼9% to 4% using a low target concentration but was not reduced in the stepwise condition as compared to the historical bolus glucose feeding regimen. © 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

A space-efficient algorithm for local similarities.

Science.gov (United States)

Huang, X Q; Hardison, R C; Miller, W

1990-10-01

Existing dynamic-programming algorithms for identifying similar regions of two sequences require time and space proportional to the product of the sequence lengths. Often this space requirement is more limiting than the time requirement. We describe a dynamic-programming local-similarity algorithm that needs only space proportional to the sum of the sequence lengths. The method can also find repeats within a single long sequence. To illustrate the algorithm's potential, we discuss comparison of a 73,360 nucleotide sequence containing the human beta-like globin gene cluster and a corresponding 44,594 nucleotide sequence for rabbit, a problem well beyond the capabilities of other dynamic-programming software.

Treating cell culture media with UV irradiation against adventitious agents: minimal impact on CHO performance.

Science.gov (United States)

Yen, Sandi; Sokolenko, Stanislav; Manocha, Bhavik; Blondeel, Eric J M; Aucoin, Marc G; Patras, Ankit; Daynouri-Pancino, Farnaz; Sasges, Michael

2014-01-01

Sterility of cell culture media is an important concern in biotherapeutic processing. In large scale biotherapeutic production, a unit contamination of cell culture media can have costly effects. Ultraviolet (UV) irradiation is a sterilization method effective against bacteria and viruses while being non-thermal and non-adulterating in its mechanism of action. This makes UV irradiation attractive for use in sterilization of cell culture media. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of UV irradiation of cell culture media in terms of chemical composition and the ability to grow cell cultures in the treated media. The results showed that UV irradiation of commercial cell culture media at relevant disinfection doses impacted the chemical composition of the media with respect to several carboxylic acids, and to a minimal extent, amino acids. The cumulative effect of these changes, however, did not negatively influence the ability to culture Chinese Hamster Ovary cells, as evaluated by cell viability, growth rate, and protein titer measurements in simple batch growth compared with the same cells cultured in control media exposed to visible light. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

Self-similarity of the negative binomial multiplicity distributions

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Calucci, G.; Treleani, D.

1998-01-01

The negative binomial distribution is self-similar: If the spectrum over the whole rapidity range gives rise to a negative binomial, in the absence of correlation and if the source is unique, also a partial range in rapidity gives rise to the same distribution. The property is not seen in experimental data, which are rather consistent with the presence of a number of independent sources. When multiplicities are very large, self-similarity might be used to isolate individual sources in a complex production process. copyright 1997 The American Physical Society

Effective Results Analysis for the Similar Software Products’ Orthogonality

OpenAIRE

Ion Ivan; Daniel Milodin

2009-01-01

It is defined the concept of similar software. There are established conditions of archiving the software components. It is carried out the orthogonality evaluation and the correlation between the orthogonality and the complexity of the homogenous software components is analyzed. Shall proceed to build groups of similar software products, belonging to the orthogonality intervals. There are presented in graphical form the results of the analysis. There are detailed aspects of the functioning o...

Recent mass spectrometry-based techniques and considerations for disulfide bond characterization in proteins.

Science.gov (United States)

Lakbub, Jude C; Shipman, Joshua T; Desaire, Heather

2018-04-01

Disulfide bonds are important structural moieties of proteins: they ensure proper folding, provide stability, and ensure proper function. With the increasing use of proteins for biotherapeutics, particularly monoclonal antibodies, which are highly disulfide bonded, it is now important to confirm the correct disulfide bond connectivity and to verify the presence, or absence, of disulfide bond variants in the protein therapeutics. These studies help to ensure safety and efficacy. Hence, disulfide bonds are among the critical quality attributes of proteins that have to be monitored closely during the development of biotherapeutics. However, disulfide bond analysis is challenging because of the complexity of the biomolecules. Mass spectrometry (MS) has been the go-to analytical tool for the characterization of such complex biomolecules, and several methods have been reported to meet the challenging task of mapping disulfide bonds in proteins. In this review, we describe the relevant, recent MS-based techniques and provide important considerations needed for efficient disulfide bond analysis in proteins. The review focuses on methods for proper sample preparation, fragmentation techniques for disulfide bond analysis, recent disulfide bond mapping methods based on the fragmentation techniques, and automated algorithms designed for rapid analysis of disulfide bonds from liquid chromatography-MS/MS data. Researchers involved in method development for protein characterization can use the information herein to facilitate development of new MS-based methods for protein disulfide bond analysis. In addition, individuals characterizing biotherapeutics, especially by disulfide bond mapping in antibodies, can use this review to choose the best strategies for disulfide bond assignment of their biologic products. Graphical Abstract This review, describing characterization methods for disulfide bonds in proteins, focuses on three critical components: sample preparation, mass

Characterization of CG6178 gene product with high sequence similarity to firefly luciferase in Drosophila melanogaster.

Science.gov (United States)

Oba, Yuichi; Ojika, Makoto; Inouye, Satoshi

2004-03-31

This is the first identification of a long-chain fatty acyl-CoA synthetase in Drosophila by enzymatic characterization. The gene product of CG6178 (CG6178) in Drosophila melanogaster genome, which has a high sequence similarity to firefly luciferase, has been expressed and characterized. CG6178 showed long-chain fatty acyl-CoA synthetic activity in the presence of ATP, CoA and Mg(2+), suggesting a fatty acyl adenylate is an intermediate. Recently, it was revealed that firefly luciferase has two catalytic functions, monooxygenase (luciferase) and AMP-mediated CoA ligase (fatty acyl-CoA synthetase). However, unlike firefly luciferase, CG6178 did not show luminescence activity in the presence of firefly luciferin, ATP, CoA and Mg(2+). The enzymatic properties of CG6178 including substrate specificity, pH dependency and optimal temperature were close to those of firefly luciferase and rat fatty acyl-CoA synthetase. Further, phylogenic analyses strongly suggest that the firefly luciferase gene may have evolved from a fatty acyl-CoA synthetase gene as a common ancestral gene.

The Application of Similar Image Retrieval in Electronic Commerce

Science.gov (United States)

Hu, YuPing; Yin, Hua; Han, Dezhi; Yu, Fei

2014-01-01

Traditional online shopping platform (OSP), which searches product information by keywords, faces three problems: indirect search mode, large search space, and inaccuracy in search results. For solving these problems, we discuss and research the application of similar image retrieval in electronic commerce. Aiming at improving the network customers' experience and providing merchants with the accuracy of advertising, we design a reasonable and extensive electronic commerce application system, which includes three subsystems: image search display subsystem, image search subsystem, and product information collecting subsystem. This system can provide seamless connection between information platform and OSP, on which consumers can automatically and directly search similar images according to the pictures from information platform. At the same time, it can be used to provide accuracy of internet marketing for enterprises. The experiment shows the efficiency of constructing the system. PMID:24883411

The Application of Similar Image Retrieval in Electronic Commerce

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

YuPing Hu

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Traditional online shopping platform (OSP, which searches product information by keywords, faces three problems: indirect search mode, large search space, and inaccuracy in search results. For solving these problems, we discuss and research the application of similar image retrieval in electronic commerce. Aiming at improving the network customers’ experience and providing merchants with the accuracy of advertising, we design a reasonable and extensive electronic commerce application system, which includes three subsystems: image search display subsystem, image search subsystem, and product information collecting subsystem. This system can provide seamless connection between information platform and OSP, on which consumers can automatically and directly search similar images according to the pictures from information platform. At the same time, it can be used to provide accuracy of internet marketing for enterprises. The experiment shows the efficiency of constructing the system.

The application of similar image retrieval in electronic commerce.

Science.gov (United States)

Hu, YuPing; Yin, Hua; Han, Dezhi; Yu, Fei

2014-01-01

Traditional online shopping platform (OSP), which searches product information by keywords, faces three problems: indirect search mode, large search space, and inaccuracy in search results. For solving these problems, we discuss and research the application of similar image retrieval in electronic commerce. Aiming at improving the network customers' experience and providing merchants with the accuracy of advertising, we design a reasonable and extensive electronic commerce application system, which includes three subsystems: image search display subsystem, image search subsystem, and product information collecting subsystem. This system can provide seamless connection between information platform and OSP, on which consumers can automatically and directly search similar images according to the pictures from information platform. At the same time, it can be used to provide accuracy of internet marketing for enterprises. The experiment shows the efficiency of constructing the system.

Anomaly Detection in Nanofibrous Materials by CNN-Based Self-Similarity

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Paolo Napoletano

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Automatic detection and localization of anomalies in nanofibrous materials help to reduce the cost of the production process and the time of the post-production visual inspection process. Amongst all the monitoring methods, those exploiting Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM imaging are the most effective. In this paper, we propose a region-based method for the detection and localization of anomalies in SEM images, based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs and self-similarity. The method evaluates the degree of abnormality of each subregion of an image under consideration by computing a CNN-based visual similarity with respect to a dictionary of anomaly-free subregions belonging to a training set. The proposed method outperforms the state of the art.

Content of oak moss allergens atranol and chloroatranol in perfumes and similar products

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Rastogi, Suresh Chandra; Bossi, Rossana; Johansen, Jeanne D

2004-01-01

available on the European market. In total, 31 products were analysed by liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-tandemmass spectrometry (LC-ESI-MS-MS) for their contents of atranol and chloroatranol. The 2 substances were found in 87% (n = 27) of the products. The median concentration of atranol...

George gives to geology Jane : the name letter effect and incidental similarity cues in fundraising

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Bekkers, René H.F.P.

2010-01-01

- People tend to like others with attributes similar to their own (the similarity principle) and favor products with names similar to their own (the name letter effect). - In the present field experiment, the name letter effect and similarity principle are tested in a phonaton among alumni of

Contrasting ecosystem-effects of morphologically similar copepods.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Blake Matthews

Full Text Available Organisms alter the biotic and abiotic conditions of ecosystems. They can modulate the availability of resources to other species (ecosystem engineering and shape selection pressures on other organisms (niche construction. Very little is known about how the engineering effects of organisms vary among and within species, and, as a result, the ecosystem consequences of species diversification and phenotypic evolution are poorly understood. Here, using a common gardening experiment, we test whether morphologically similar species and populations of Diaptomidae copepods (Leptodiaptomus ashlandi, Hesperodiaptomus franciscanus, Skistodiaptomus oregonensis have similar or different effects on the structure and function of freshwater ecosystems. We found that copepod species had contrasting effects on algal biomass, ammonium concentrations, and sedimentation rates, and that copepod populations had contrasting effects on prokaryote abundance, sedimentation rates, and gross primary productivity. The average size of ecosystem-effect contrasts between species was similar to those between populations, and was comparable to those between fish species and populations measured in previous common gardening experiments. Our results suggest that subtle morphological variation among and within species can cause multifarious and divergent ecosystem-effects. We conclude that using morphological trait variation to assess the functional similarity of organisms may underestimate the importance of species and population diversity for ecosystem functioning.

Binary similarity measures for fingerprint analysis of qualitative metabolomic profiles.

Science.gov (United States)

Rácz, Anita; Andrić, Filip; Bajusz, Dávid; Héberger, Károly

2018-01-01

Contemporary metabolomic fingerprinting is based on multiple spectrometric and chromatographic signals, used either alone or combined with structural and chemical information of metabolic markers at the qualitative and semiquantitative level. However, signal shifting, convolution, and matrix effects may compromise metabolomic patterns. Recent increase in the use of qualitative metabolomic data, described by the presence (1) or absence (0) of particular metabolites, demonstrates great potential in the field of metabolomic profiling and fingerprint analysis. The aim of this study is a comprehensive evaluation of binary similarity measures for the elucidation of patterns among samples of different botanical origin and various metabolomic profiles. Nine qualitative metabolomic data sets covering a wide range of natural products and metabolomic profiles were applied to assess 44 binary similarity measures for the fingerprinting of plant extracts and natural products. The measures were analyzed by the novel sum of ranking differences method (SRD), searching for the most promising candidates. Baroni-Urbani-Buser (BUB) and Hawkins-Dotson (HD) similarity coefficients were selected as the best measures by SRD and analysis of variance (ANOVA), while Dice (Di1), Yule, Russel-Rao, and Consonni-Todeschini 3 ranked the worst. ANOVA revealed that concordantly and intermediately symmetric similarity coefficients are better candidates for metabolomic fingerprinting than the asymmetric and correlation based ones. The fingerprint analysis based on the BUB and HD coefficients and qualitative metabolomic data performed equally well as the quantitative metabolomic profile analysis. Fingerprint analysis based on the qualitative metabolomic profiles and binary similarity measures proved to be a reliable way in finding the same/similar patterns in metabolomic data as that extracted from quantitative data.

George gives to geology Jane: The name letter effect and incidental similarity cues in fundraising

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Bekkers, R.H.F.P.

2010-01-01

People tend to like others with attributes similar to their own (the similarity principle) and favor products with names similar to their own (the name letter effect). In the present field experiment, the name letter effect and similarity principle are tested in a phonaton among alumni of Utrecht

A Comparison of Protein Stability in Prefillable Syringes Made of Glass and Plastic.

Science.gov (United States)

Waxman, Lloyd; Vilivalam, Vinod D

2017-01-01

substances used in their manufacture, including silicone oil, which is necessary for lubricity. Syringes made from the plastic cyclic olefin polymer, Daikyo Crystal Zenith® (CZ), have none of these issues. This study compared the stability of several biotherapeutic proteins when stored up to 14 months at 5 °C and 25 °C in prefillable siliconized syringes made of glass or silicone oil-free CZ syringes, and when mildly agitated at room temperature. Proteins were analyzed by several techniques to detect changes in aggregation and degradation. The results show that biotherapeutic proteins have similar stability whether stored in syringes made of glass or CZ. In addition, proteins subjected to agitation were generally more stable and aggregated less in CZ syringes than in glass syringes. © PDA, Inc. 2017.

9 CFR 309.3 - Dead, dying, disabled, or diseased and similar livestock.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... similar livestock. 309.3 Section 309.3 Animals and Animal Products FOOD SAFETY AND INSPECTION SERVICE... diseased and similar livestock. (a) Livestock found to be dead or in a dying condition on the premises of... § 309.13. (b) Livestock plainly showing on ante-mortem inspection any disease or condition that, under...

A COMPARISON OF SEMANTIC SIMILARITY MODELS IN EVALUATING CONCEPT SIMILARITY

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Q. X. Xu

2012-08-01

Full Text Available The semantic similarities are important in concept definition, recognition, categorization, interpretation, and integration. Many semantic similarity models have been established to evaluate semantic similarities of objects or/and concepts. To find out the suitability and performance of different models in evaluating concept similarities, we make a comparison of four main types of models in this paper: the geometric model, the feature model, the network model, and the transformational model. Fundamental principles and main characteristics of these models are introduced and compared firstly. Land use and land cover concepts of NLCD92 are employed as examples in the case study. The results demonstrate that correlations between these models are very high for a possible reason that all these models are designed to simulate the similarity judgement of human mind.

Towards Personalized Medicine: Leveraging Patient Similarity and Drug Similarity Analytics

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Ping; Wang, Fei; Hu, Jianying; Sorrentino, Robert

2014-01-01

The rapid adoption of electronic health records (EHR) provides a comprehensive source for exploratory and predictive analytic to support clinical decision-making. In this paper, we investigate how to utilize EHR to tailor treatments to individual patients based on their likelihood to respond to a therapy. We construct a heterogeneous graph which includes two domains (patients and drugs) and encodes three relationships (patient similarity, drug similarity, and patient-drug prior associations). We describe a novel approach for performing a label propagation procedure to spread the label information representing the effectiveness of different drugs for different patients over this heterogeneous graph. The proposed method has been applied on a real-world EHR dataset to help identify personalized treatments for hypercholesterolemia. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach and suggest that the combination of appropriate patient similarity and drug similarity analytics could lead to actionable insights for personalized medicine. Particularly, by leveraging drug similarity in combination with patient similarity, our method could perform well even on new or rarely used drugs for which there are few records of known past performance. PMID:25717413

Probiotics as oral health biotherapeutics.

Science.gov (United States)

Saha, Shyamali; Tomaro-Duchesneau, Catherine; Tabrizian, Maryam; Prakash, Satya

2012-09-01

Oral health is affected by its resident microorganisms. Three prominent oral disorders are dental caries, gingivitis and periodontitis, with the oral microbiota playing a key role in the initiation/progression of all three. Understanding the microbiota and the diseases they may cause is critical to the development of new therapeutics. This review is focused on probiotics for the prevention and/or treatment of oral diseases. This review describes the oral ecosystem and its correlation with oral health/disease. The pathogenesis and current prevention/treatment strategies of periodontal diseases (PD) and dental caries (DC) are depicted. An introduction of probiotics is followed by an analysis of their role in PD and DC, and their potential role(s) in oral health. Finally, a discussion ensues on the future research directions and limitations of probiotics for oral health. An effective oral probiotic formulation should contribute to the prevention/treatment of microbial diseases of the oral cavity. Understanding the oral microbiota's role in oral disease is important for the development of a therapeutic to prevent/treat dental diseases. However, investigations into clinical efficacy, delivery/dose optimization, mechanism(s) of action and other related parameters are yet to be fully explored. Keeping this in mind, investigations into oral probiotic therapies are proving promising.

Biotherapeutics as alternatives to antibiotics

Science.gov (United States)

Increasing pressure to limit antibiotic use in agriculture is heightening the need for alternative methods to reduce the adverse effects of clinical and subclinical disease on livestock performance that are currently managed by in-feed antibiotic usage. Immunomodulators have long been sought as such...

Chromatographic fingerprint similarity analysis for pollutant source identification

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Xie, Juan-Ping; Ni, Hong-Gang

2015-01-01

In the present study, a similarity analysis method was proposed to evaluate the source-sink relationships among environmental media for polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), which were taken as the representative contaminants. Chromatographic fingerprint analysis has been widely used in the fields of natural products chemistry and forensic chemistry, but its application to environmental science has been limited. We established a library of various sources of media containing contaminants (e.g., plastics), recognizing that the establishment of a more comprehensive library allows for a better understanding of the sources of contamination. We then compared an environmental complex mixture (e.g., sediment, soil) with the profiles in the library. These comparisons could be used as the first step in source tracking. The cosine similarities between plastic and soil or sediment ranged from 0.53 to 0.68, suggesting that plastic in electronic waste is an important source of PBDEs in the environment, but it is not the only source. A similarity analysis between soil and sediment indicated that they have a source-sink relationship. Generally, the similarity analysis method can encompass more relevant information of complex mixtures in the environment than a profile-based approach that only focuses on target pollutants. There is an inherent advantage to creating a data matrix containing all peaks and their relative levels after matching the peaks based on retention times and peak areas. This data matrix can be used for source identification via a similarity analysis without quantitative or qualitative analysis of all chemicals in a sample. - Highlights: • Chromatographic fingerprint analysis can be used as the first step in source tracking. • Similarity analysis method can encompass more relevant information of pollution. • The fingerprints strongly depend on the chromatographic conditions. • A more effective and robust method for identifying similarities is required

Molecular similarity measures.

Science.gov (United States)

Maggiora, Gerald M; Shanmugasundaram, Veerabahu

2011-01-01

Molecular similarity is a pervasive concept in chemistry. It is essential to many aspects of chemical reasoning and analysis and is perhaps the fundamental assumption underlying medicinal chemistry. Dissimilarity, the complement of similarity, also plays a major role in a growing number of applications of molecular diversity in combinatorial chemistry, high-throughput screening, and related fields. How molecular information is represented, called the representation problem, is important to the type of molecular similarity analysis (MSA) that can be carried out in any given situation. In this work, four types of mathematical structure are used to represent molecular information: sets, graphs, vectors, and functions. Molecular similarity is a pairwise relationship that induces structure into sets of molecules, giving rise to the concept of chemical space. Although all three concepts - molecular similarity, molecular representation, and chemical space - are treated in this chapter, the emphasis is on molecular similarity measures. Similarity measures, also called similarity coefficients or indices, are functions that map pairs of compatible molecular representations that are of the same mathematical form into real numbers usually, but not always, lying on the unit interval. This chapter presents a somewhat pedagogical discussion of many types of molecular similarity measures, their strengths and limitations, and their relationship to one another. An expanded account of the material on chemical spaces presented in the first edition of this book is also provided. It includes a discussion of the topography of activity landscapes and the role that activity cliffs in these landscapes play in structure-activity studies.

Demonstration of Functional Similarity of Proposed Biosimilar ABP 501 to Adalimumab.

Science.gov (United States)

Velayudhan, Jyoti; Chen, Yuh-Feng; Rohrbach, Amanda; Pastula, Christina; Maher, Gwen; Thomas, Heather; Brown, Ryan; Born, Teresa L

2016-08-01

Due to the complex molecular structure and proprietary manufacturing processes of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), differences in structure and function may be expected during development of biosimilar mAbs. Important regulatory requirements for approval of biosimilar products involve comprehensive assessments of any potential differences between proposed biosimilars and reference mAbs, including differences in all known mechanisms of action, using sensitive and relevant methods. Any identified structural differences should not result in differences in biofunctional or clinical activity. A comprehensive assessment comparing the Amgen biosimilar candidate ABP 501 with FDA-licensed adalimumab (adalimumab [US]) and EU-authorized adalimumab (adalimumab [EU]) was conducted to demonstrate similarity in biofunctional activity. The functional similarity assessment included testing of binding kinetics to soluble tumor necrosis factor α (TNFα) and relative binding to transmembrane TNFα. The neutralization of TNFα-induced caspase activation, TNFα- and lymphotoxin-α (LTα)-induced chemokine production, and cytotoxicity was also tested. Binding to Fc-gamma receptors FcγRIa, FcγRIIa (131H), FcγRIIIa (158V and 158F), and neonatal Fc receptor (FcRn) was compared with the reference mAbs, as was antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity and complement-dependent cytotoxicity. The data demonstrate that ABP 501 is similar to both adalimumab (US) and adalimumab (EU) with respect to evaluated biofunctional activities. Similarity in biofunctional activity is a critical component of the totality of evidence required for demonstration of biosimilarity. The functional similarity demonstrated for ABP 501 comprehensively assesses the known mechanisms of action of adalimumab, supporting the conclusion that ABP 501, adalimumab (US), and adalimumab (EU) are likely to be clinically similar.

Similarly shaped letters evoke similar colors in grapheme-color synesthesia.

Science.gov (United States)

Brang, David; Rouw, Romke; Ramachandran, V S; Coulson, Seana

2011-04-01

Grapheme-color synesthesia is a neurological condition in which viewing numbers or letters (graphemes) results in the concurrent sensation of color. While the anatomical substrates underlying this experience are well understood, little research to date has investigated factors influencing the particular colors associated with particular graphemes or how synesthesia occurs developmentally. A recent suggestion of such an interaction has been proposed in the cascaded cross-tuning (CCT) model of synesthesia, which posits that in synesthetes connections between grapheme regions and color area V4 participate in a competitive activation process, with synesthetic colors arising during the component-stage of grapheme processing. This model more directly suggests that graphemes sharing similar component features (lines, curves, etc.) should accordingly activate more similar synesthetic colors. To test this proposal, we created and regressed synesthetic color-similarity matrices for each of 52 synesthetes against a letter-confusability matrix, an unbiased measure of visual similarity among graphemes. Results of synesthetes' grapheme-color correspondences indeed revealed that more similarly shaped graphemes corresponded with more similar synesthetic colors, with stronger effects observed in individuals with more intense synesthetic experiences (projector synesthetes). These results support the CCT model of synesthesia, implicate early perceptual mechanisms as driving factors in the elicitation of synesthetic hues, and further highlight the relationship between conceptual and perceptual factors in this phenomenon. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Investigating Correlation between Protein Sequence Similarity and Semantic Similarity Using Gene Ontology Annotations.

Science.gov (United States)

Ikram, Najmul; Qadir, Muhammad Abdul; Afzal, Muhammad Tanvir

2018-01-01

Sequence similarity is a commonly used measure to compare proteins. With the increasing use of ontologies, semantic (function) similarity is getting importance. The correlation between these measures has been applied in the evaluation of new semantic similarity methods, and in protein function prediction. In this research, we investigate the relationship between the two similarity methods. The results suggest absence of a strong correlation between sequence and semantic similarities. There is a large number of proteins with low sequence similarity and high semantic similarity. We observe that Pearson's correlation coefficient is not sufficient to explain the nature of this relationship. Interestingly, the term semantic similarity values above 0 and below 1 do not seem to play a role in improving the correlation. That is, the correlation coefficient depends only on the number of common GO terms in proteins under comparison, and the semantic similarity measurement method does not influence it. Semantic similarity and sequence similarity have a distinct behavior. These findings are of significant effect for future works on protein comparison, and will help understand the semantic similarity between proteins in a better way.

Regulatory challenges and approaches to characterize nanomedicines and their follow-on similars.

Science.gov (United States)

Mühlebach, Stefan; Borchard, Gerrit; Yildiz, Selcan

2015-03-01

Nanomedicines are highly complex products and are the result of difficult to control manufacturing processes. Nonbiological complex drugs and their biological counterparts can comprise nanoparticles and therefore show nanomedicine characteristics. They consist of not fully known nonhomomolecular structures, and can therefore not be characterized by physicochemical means only. Also, intended copies of nanomedicines (follow-on similars) may have clinically meaningful differences, creating the regulatory challenge of how to grant a high degree of assurance for patients' benefit and safety. As an example, the current regulatory approach for marketing authorization of intended copies of nonbiological complex drugs appears inappropriate; also, a valid strategy incorporating the complexity of such systems is undefined. To demonstrate sufficient similarity and comparability, a stepwise quality, nonclinical and clinical approach is necessary to obtain market authorization for follow-on products as therapeutic alternatives, substitution and/or interchangeable products. To fill the regulatory gap, harmonized and science-based standards are needed.

New Similarity Functions

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Yazdani, Hossein; Ortiz-Arroyo, Daniel; Kwasnicka, Halina

2016-01-01

spaces, in addition to their similarity in the vector space. Prioritized Weighted Feature Distance (PWFD) works similarly as WFD, but provides the ability to give priorities to desirable features. The accuracy of the proposed functions are compared with other similarity functions on several data sets....... Our results show that the proposed functions work better than other methods proposed in the literature....

Biosimilars: A consideration of the regulations in the United States and European union.

Science.gov (United States)

Daller, Justin

2016-04-01

Biosimilars are defined as biological products that are highly similar to a reference product, notwithstanding minor differences in clinically inactive components. Biosimilars show no clinically meaningful differences in safety, purity, and potency of the product in comparison to the reference product. With the ever looming patent expiry of some major high cost biologics, biosimilar production is becoming ever more lucrative to companies. Europe (EU) set the precedent, followed by the United States (US) in early 2012, for the approval process for biosimilars. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of the regulatory processes in the US and EU and to determine the requirements of each in the approval process of a biosimilar. The current Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency's (EMA) guidance documents for biosimilars were reviewed revealing a need for further clarifications, as well as specifically addressing Celltrion's and Sandoz's application for approval for the biosimilars infliximab and filgrastim, respectively. Currently, the FDA and EMA focus on comparability in terms of the clinical, pharmacokinetic (PK)/pharmacodynamic (PD), preclinical, biological activity, and physiochemical characterization results, as well as requiring a robust and consistent manufacturing process. Both the EU and US have prepared guidance documents for biosimilars that will result in biotherapeutics that are as safe and efficacious as the innovator product but the necessity exists to globally harmonize international nonproprietary naming nomenclature and clarify how the concept of pharmacovigilance, extrapolation, and interchangeability will be handled and regulated in the future. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

[Similarity system theory to evaluate similarity of chromatographic fingerprints of traditional Chinese medicine].

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Yongsuo; Meng, Qinghua; Jiang, Shumin; Hu, Yuzhu

2005-03-01

The similarity evaluation of the fingerprints is one of the most important problems in the quality control of the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Similarity measures used to evaluate the similarity of the common peaks in the chromatogram of TCM have been discussed. Comparative studies were carried out among correlation coefficient, cosine of the angle and an improved extent similarity method using simulated data and experimental data. Correlation coefficient and cosine of the angle are not sensitive to the differences of the data set. They are still not sensitive to the differences of the data even after normalization. According to the similarity system theory, an improved extent similarity method was proposed. The improved extent similarity is more sensitive to the differences of the data sets than correlation coefficient and cosine of the angle. And the character of the data sets needs not to be changed compared with log-transformation. The improved extent similarity can be used to evaluate the similarity of the chromatographic fingerprints of TCM.

Quantitative intracellular flux modeling and applications in biotherapeutic development and production using CHO cell cultures.

Science.gov (United States)

Huang, Zhuangrong; Lee, Dong-Yup; Yoon, Seongkyu

2017-12-01

Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells have been widely used for producing many recombinant therapeutic proteins. Constraint-based modeling, such as flux balance analysis (FBA) and metabolic flux analysis (MFA), has been developing rapidly for the quantification of intracellular metabolic flux distribution at a systematic level. Such methods would produce detailed maps of flows through metabolic networks, which contribute significantly to better understanding of metabolism in cells. Although these approaches have been extensively established in microbial systems, their application to mammalian cells is sparse. This review brings together the recent development of constraint-based models and their applications in CHO cells. The further development of constraint-based modeling approaches driven by multi-omics datasets is discussed, and a framework of potential modeling application in cell culture engineering is proposed. Improved cell culture system understanding will enable robust developments in cell line and bioprocess engineering thus accelerating consistent process quality control in biopharmaceutical manufacturing. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Engineering soya bean seeds as a scalable platform to produce cyanovirin-N, a non-ARV microbicide against HIV.

Science.gov (United States)

O'Keefe, Barry R; Murad, André M; Vianna, Giovanni R; Ramessar, Koreen; Saucedo, Carrie J; Wilson, Jennifer; Buckheit, Karen W; da Cunha, Nicolau B; Araújo, Ana Claudia G; Lacorte, Cristiano C; Madeira, Luisa; McMahon, James B; Rech, Elibio L

2015-09-01

There is an urgent need to provide effective anti-HIV microbicides to resource-poor areas worldwide. Some of the most promising microbicide candidates are biotherapeutics targeting viral entry. To provide biotherapeutics to poorer areas, it is vital to reduce the cost. Here, we report the production of biologically active recombinant cyanovirin-N (rCV-N), an antiviral protein, in genetically engineered soya bean seeds. Pure, biologically active rCV-N was isolated with a yield of 350 μg/g of dry seed weight. The observed amino acid sequence of rCV-N matched the expected sequence of native CV-N, as did the mass of rCV-N (11 009 Da). Purified rCV-N from soya is active in anti-HIV assays with an EC50 of 0.82-2.7 nM (compared to 0.45-1.8 nM for E. coli-produced CV-N). Standard industrial processing of soya bean seeds to harvest soya bean oil does not diminish the antiviral activity of recovered rCV-N, allowing the use of industrial soya bean processing to generate both soya bean oil and a recombinant protein for anti-HIV microbicide development. © 2015 The Authors. Plant Biotechnology Journal published by Society for Experimental Biology and The Association of Applied Biologists and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Remarks on the church in the consumer society: similarities and ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Pastors should make it clear that the gospel message is not a product for sale; however the gospel message should be directed at the needs of people. This article outlines the influence of the consumer society on the church. The article also outlines the similarities and dissimilarities between the church and the consumer ...

The effects of familiarity and similarity on compliance in social networks

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Kaptein, M.C.; Nass, C.; Markopoulos, P.

2014-01-01

Advertisers on social network sites often use recommendations by others in a user's networks to endorse products. While these familiar others are hypothesised to be more effective in influencing users than unfamiliar others, there is a catch: familiarity does not necessarily ensure similarity to the

Self-similar pattern formation and continuous mechanics of self-similar systems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

A. V. Dyskin

2007-01-01

Full Text Available In many cases, the critical state of systems that reached the threshold is characterised by self-similar pattern formation. We produce an example of pattern formation of this kind – formation of self-similar distribution of interacting fractures. Their formation starts with the crack growth due to the action of stress fluctuations. It is shown that even when the fluctuations have zero average the cracks generated by them could grow far beyond the scale of stress fluctuations. Further development of the fracture system is controlled by crack interaction leading to the emergence of self-similar crack distributions. As a result, the medium with fractures becomes discontinuous at any scale. We develop a continuum fractal mechanics to model its physical behaviour. We introduce a continuous sequence of continua of increasing scales covering this range of scales. The continuum of each scale is specified by the representative averaging volume elements of the corresponding size. These elements determine the resolution of the continuum. Each continuum hides the cracks of scales smaller than the volume element size while larger fractures are modelled explicitly. Using the developed formalism we investigate the stability of self-similar crack distributions with respect to crack growth and show that while the self-similar distribution of isotropically oriented cracks is stable, the distribution of parallel cracks is not. For the isotropically oriented cracks scaling of permeability is determined. For permeable materials (rocks with self-similar crack distributions permeability scales as cube of crack radius. This property could be used for detecting this specific mechanism of formation of self-similar crack distributions.

Designing proteins for therapeutic applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Lazar, Greg A; Marshall, Shannon A; Plecs, Joseph J; Mayo, Stephen L; Desjarlais, John R

2003-08-01

Protein design is becoming an increasingly useful tool for optimizing protein drugs and creating novel biotherapeutics. Recent progress includes the engineering of monoclonal antibodies, cytokines, enzymes and viral fusion inhibitors.

Similarity searching and scaffold hopping in synthetically accessible combinatorial chemistry spaces.

Science.gov (United States)

Boehm, Markus; Wu, Tong-Ying; Claussen, Holger; Lemmen, Christian

2008-04-24

Large collections of combinatorial libraries are an integral element in today's pharmaceutical industry. It is of great interest to perform similarity searches against all virtual compounds that are synthetically accessible by any such library. Here we describe the successful application of a new software tool CoLibri on 358 combinatorial libraries based on validated reaction protocols to create a single chemistry space containing over 10 (12) possible products. Similarity searching with FTrees-FS allows the systematic exploration of this space without the need to enumerate all product structures. The search result is a set of virtual hits which are synthetically accessible by one or more of the existing reaction protocols. Grouping these virtual hits by their synthetic protocols allows the rapid design and synthesis of multiple follow-up libraries. Such library ideas support hit-to-lead design efforts for tasks like follow-up from high-throughput screening hits or scaffold hopping from one hit to another attractive series.

Narrative transportation in concept tests for really new products: the moderating effect of reader-protagonist similarity

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van den Hende, E.A.; Dahl, D.W.; Schoormans, J.P.L.; Snelders, D.

2012-01-01

The authors investigate the benefits of using a narrative (i.e., a storyline featuring a protagonist) to convey product information in the evaluation of really new product concepts by consumers. In the context of early product evaluation, the imagination of consumers can be guided by a narrative

Narrative transportation in concept tests for really new products : the moderating effect of reader-protagonist similarity

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hende, van den E.A.; Dahl, D.W.; Schoormans, J.P.L.; Snelders, H.M.J.J.

2012-01-01

The authors investigate the benefits of using a narrative (i.e., a storyline featuring a protagonist) to convey product information in the evaluation of really new product concepts by consumers. In the context of early product evaluation, the imagination of consumers can be guided by a narrative

Automatic Identification of Similarities Across Products to Improve the Configuration Process in ETO Companies

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Shafiee, Sara; Kristjansdottir, Katrin; Hvam, Lars

2017-01-01

Engineer-To-Order (ETO) companies making complex products face the challenge of delivering highly customised products with high quality, affordable price and a short delivery time. To respond to these challenges, ETO companies strive to increase the commonality between different projects and to r...... in an ETO company to evaluate the application of the framework and the IT system. We retrieved the needed data from the ERP system at the case company and developed the IT system in Microsoft Excel, which is integrated with the PCS....

Self-similarity of high-pT hadron production in cumulative processes and violation of discrete symmetries at small scales (suggestion for experiment)

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Tokarev, M.V.; Zborovsky, I.

2009-01-01

The hypothesis of self-similarity of hadron production in relativistic heavy ion collisions for search for phase transition in a nuclear matter is discussed. It is offered to use the established features of z-scaling for revealing signatures of new physics in cumulative region. It is noted that selection of events on centrality in cumulative region could help to localize a position of a critical point. Change of parameters of the theory (a specific heat and fractal dimensions) near to a critical point is considered as a signature of new physics. The relation of the power asymptotic of ψ(z) at high z, anisotropy of momentum space due to spontaneous symmetry breaking, and discrete (C, P, T) symmetries is emphasized

Geographical markers for Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains with similar technological origins domesticated for rice-based ethnic fermented beverages production in North East India.

Science.gov (United States)

Jeyaram, Kumaraswamy; Tamang, Jyoti Prakash; Capece, Angela; Romano, Patrizia

2011-11-01

Autochthonous strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae from traditional starters used for the production of rice-based ethnic fermented beverage in North East India were examined for their genetic polymorphism using mitochondrial DNA-RFLP and electrophoretic karyotyping. Mitochondrial DNA-RFLP analysis of S. cerevisiae strains with similar technological origins from hamei starter of Manipur and marcha starter of Sikkim revealed widely separated clusters based on their geographical origin. Electrophoretic karyotyping showed high polymorphism amongst the hamei strains within similar mitochondrial DNA-RFLP cluster and one unique karyotype of marcha strain was widely distributed in the Sikkim-Himalayan region. We conceptualized the possibility of separate domestication events for hamei strains in Manipur (located in the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot) and marcha strains in Sikkim (located in Himalayan biodiversity hotspot), as a consequence of less homogeneity in the genomic structure between these two groups, their clear separation being based on geographical origin, but not on technological origin and low strain level diversity within each group. The molecular markers developed based on HinfI-mtDNA-RFLP profile and the chromosomal doublets in chromosome VIII position of Sikkim-Himalayan strains could be effectively used as geographical markers for authenticating the above starter strains and differentiating them from other commercial strains.

Evaluating the Similarity of Complex Drinking-Water Disinfection By-Product Mixtures: Overview of the Issues

Science.gov (United States)

The Presentation describes the advantages and challenges of working with Whole Mixtures, discusses an exploratory approach for evaluating sufficient similarity, and challenges of applying such approaches to other environmental mixtures.

Data mining technique for fast retrieval of similar waveforms in Fusion massive databases

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Vega, J.; Pereira, A.; Portas, A.; Dormido-Canto, S.; Farias, G.; Dormido, R.; Sanchez, J.; Duro, N.; Santos, M.; Sanchez, E.; Pajares, G.

2008-01-01

Fusion measurement systems generate similar waveforms for reproducible behavior. A major difficulty related to data analysis is the identification, in a rapid and automated way, of a set of discharges with comparable behaviour, i.e. discharges with 'similar' waveforms. Here we introduce a new technique for rapid searching and retrieval of 'similar' signals. The approach consists of building a classification system that avoids traversing the whole database looking for similarities. The classification system diminishes the problem dimensionality (by means of waveform feature extraction) and reduces the searching space to just the most probable 'similar' waveforms (clustering techniques). In the searching procedure, the input waveform is classified in any of the existing clusters. Then, a similarity measure is computed between the input signal and all cluster elements in order to identify the most similar waveforms. The inner product of normalized vectors is used as the similarity measure as it allows the searching process to be independent of signal gain and polarity. This development has been applied recently to TJ-II stellarator databases and has been integrated into its remote participation system

Phoneme Similarity and Confusability

Science.gov (United States)

Bailey, T.M.; Hahn, U.

2005-01-01

Similarity between component speech sounds influences language processing in numerous ways. Explanation and detailed prediction of linguistic performance consequently requires an understanding of these basic similarities. The research reported in this paper contrasts two broad classes of approach to the issue of phoneme similarity-theoretically…

Self-similar factor approximants

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Gluzman, S.; Yukalov, V.I.; Sornette, D.

2003-01-01

The problem of reconstructing functions from their asymptotic expansions in powers of a small variable is addressed by deriving an improved type of approximants. The derivation is based on the self-similar approximation theory, which presents the passage from one approximant to another as the motion realized by a dynamical system with the property of group self-similarity. The derived approximants, because of their form, are called self-similar factor approximants. These complement the obtained earlier self-similar exponential approximants and self-similar root approximants. The specific feature of self-similar factor approximants is that their control functions, providing convergence of the computational algorithm, are completely defined from the accuracy-through-order conditions. These approximants contain the Pade approximants as a particular case, and in some limit they can be reduced to the self-similar exponential approximants previously introduced by two of us. It is proved that the self-similar factor approximants are able to reproduce exactly a wide class of functions, which include a variety of nonalgebraic functions. For other functions, not pertaining to this exactly reproducible class, the factor approximants provide very accurate approximations, whose accuracy surpasses significantly that of the most accurate Pade approximants. This is illustrated by a number of examples showing the generality and accuracy of the factor approximants even when conventional techniques meet serious difficulties

Nuclear markers reveal that inter-lake cichlids' similar morphologies do not reflect similar genealogy.

Science.gov (United States)

Kassam, Daud; Seki, Shingo; Horic, Michio; Yamaoka, Kosaku

2006-08-01

The apparent inter-lake morphological similarity among East African Great Lakes' cichlid species/genera has left evolutionary biologists asking whether such similarity is due to sharing of common ancestor or mere convergent evolution. In order to answer such question, we first used Geometric Morphometrics, GM, to quantify morphological similarity and then subsequently used Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism, AFLP, to determine if similar morphologies imply shared ancestry or convergent evolution. GM revealed that not all presumed morphological similar pairs were indeed similar, and the dendrogram generated from AFLP data indicated distinct clusters corresponding to each lake and not inter-lake morphological similar pairs. Such results imply that the morphological similarity is due to convergent evolution and not shared ancestry. The congruency of GM and AFLP generated dendrograms imply that GM is capable of picking up phylogenetic signal, and thus GM can be potential tool in phylogenetic systematics.

Determination of subjective similarity for pairs of masses and pairs of clustered microcalcifications on mammograms: Comparison of similarity ranking scores and absolute similarity ratings

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Muramatsu, Chisako; Li Qiang; Schmidt, Robert A.; Shiraishi, Junji; Suzuki, Kenji; Newstead, Gillian M.; Doi, Kunio

2007-01-01

The presentation of images that are similar to that of an unknown lesion seen on a mammogram may be helpful for radiologists to correctly diagnose that lesion. For similar images to be useful, they must be quite similar from the radiologists' point of view. We have been trying to quantify the radiologists' impression of similarity for pairs of lesions and to establish a ''gold standard'' for development and evaluation of a computerized scheme for selecting such similar images. However, it is considered difficult to reliably and accurately determine similarity ratings, because they are subjective. In this study, we compared the subjective similarities obtained by two different methods, an absolute rating method and a 2-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) method, to demonstrate that reliable similarity ratings can be determined by the responses of a group of radiologists. The absolute similarity ratings were previously obtained for pairs of masses and pairs of microcalcifications from five and nine radiologists, respectively. In this study, similarity ranking scores for eight pairs of masses and eight pairs of microcalcifications were determined by use of the 2AFC method. In the first session, the eight pairs of masses and eight pairs of microcalcifications were grouped and compared separately for determining the similarity ranking scores. In the second session, another similarity ranking score was determined by use of mixed pairs, i.e., by comparison of the similarity of a mass pair with that of a calcification pair. Four pairs of masses and four pairs of microcalcifications were grouped together to create two sets of eight pairs. The average absolute similarity ratings and the average similarity ranking scores showed very good correlations in the first study (Pearson's correlation coefficients: 0.94 and 0.98 for masses and microcalcifications, respectively). Moreover, in the second study, the correlations between the absolute ratings and the ranking scores were also

Evaluation of GO-based functional similarity measures using S. cerevisiae protein interaction and expression profile data

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Du LinFang

2008-11-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Researchers interested in analysing the expression patterns of functionally related genes usually hope to improve the accuracy of their results beyond the boundaries of currently available experimental data. Gene ontology (GO data provides a novel way to measure the functional relationship between gene products. Many approaches have been reported for calculating the similarities between two GO terms, known as semantic similarities. However, biologists are more interested in the relationship between gene products than in the scores linking the GO terms. To highlight the relationships among genes, recent studies have focused on functional similarities. Results In this study, we evaluated five functional similarity methods using both protein-protein interaction (PPI and expression data of S. cerevisiae. The receiver operating characteristics (ROC and correlation coefficient analysis of these methods showed that the maximum method outperformed the other methods. Statistical comparison of multiple- and single-term annotated proteins in biological process ontology indicated that genes with multiple GO terms may be more reliable for separating true positives from noise. Conclusion This study demonstrated the reliability of current approaches that elevate the similarity of GO terms to the similarity of proteins. Suggestions for further improvements in functional similarity analysis are also provided.

Similarity Measure of Graphs

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Amine Labriji

2017-07-01

Full Text Available The topic of identifying the similarity of graphs was considered as highly recommended research field in the Web semantic, artificial intelligence, the shape recognition and information research. One of the fundamental problems of graph databases is finding similar graphs to a graph query. Existing approaches dealing with this problem are usually based on the nodes and arcs of the two graphs, regardless of parental semantic links. For instance, a common connection is not identified as being part of the similarity of two graphs in cases like two graphs without common concepts, the measure of similarity based on the union of two graphs, or the one based on the notion of maximum common sub-graph (SCM, or the distance of edition of graphs. This leads to an inadequate situation in the context of information research. To overcome this problem, we suggest a new measure of similarity between graphs, based on the similarity measure of Wu and Palmer. We have shown that this new measure satisfies the properties of a measure of similarities and we applied this new measure on examples. The results show that our measure provides a run time with a gain of time compared to existing approaches. In addition, we compared the relevance of the similarity values obtained, it appears that this new graphs measure is advantageous and  offers a contribution to solving the problem mentioned above.

Extending the Similarity-Attraction Effect : The effects of When-Similarity in mediated communication

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Kaptein, M.C.; Castaneda, D.; Fernandez, N.; Nass, C.

2014-01-01

The feeling of connectedness experienced in computer-mediated relationships can be explained by the similarity-attraction effect (SAE). Though SAE is well established in psychology, the effects of some types of similarity have not yet been explored. In 2 studies, we demonstrate similarity-attraction

The semantic similarity ensemble

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andrea Ballatore

2013-12-01

Full Text Available Computational measures of semantic similarity between geographic terms provide valuable support across geographic information retrieval, data mining, and information integration. To date, a wide variety of approaches to geo-semantic similarity have been devised. A judgment of similarity is not intrinsically right or wrong, but obtains a certain degree of cognitive plausibility, depending on how closely it mimics human behavior. Thus selecting the most appropriate measure for a specific task is a significant challenge. To address this issue, we make an analogy between computational similarity measures and soliciting domain expert opinions, which incorporate a subjective set of beliefs, perceptions, hypotheses, and epistemic biases. Following this analogy, we define the semantic similarity ensemble (SSE as a composition of different similarity measures, acting as a panel of experts having to reach a decision on the semantic similarity of a set of geographic terms. The approach is evaluated in comparison to human judgments, and results indicate that an SSE performs better than the average of its parts. Although the best member tends to outperform the ensemble, all ensembles outperform the average performance of each ensemble's member. Hence, in contexts where the best measure is unknown, the ensemble provides a more cognitively plausible approach.

Similar Symmetries: The Role of Wallpaper Groups in Perceptual Texture Similarity

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Fraser Halley

2011-05-01

Full Text Available Periodic patterns and symmetries are striking visual properties that have been used decoratively around the world throughout human history. Periodic patterns can be mathematically classified into one of 17 different Wallpaper groups, and while computational models have been developed which can extract an image's symmetry group, very little work has been done on how humans perceive these patterns. This study presents the results from a grouping experiment using stimuli from the different wallpaper groups. We find that while different images from the same wallpaper group are perceived as similar to one another, not all groups have the same degree of self-similarity. The similarity relationships between wallpaper groups appear to be dominated by rotations.

Cell-based delivery of oncolytic viruses: a new strategic alliance for a biological strike against cancer.

Science.gov (United States)

Power, Anthony T; Bell, John C

2007-04-01

Recent years have seen tremendous advances in the development of exquisitely targeted replicating virotherapeutics that can safely destroy malignant cells. Despite this promise, clinical advancement of this powerful and unique approach has been hindered by vulnerability to host defenses and inefficient systemic delivery. However, it now appears that delivery of oncolytic viruses within carrier cells may offer one solution to this critical problem. In this review, we compare the advantages and limitations of the numerous cell lineages that have been investigated as delivery platforms for viral therapeutics, and discuss examples showing how combined cell-virus biotherapeutics can be used to achieve synergistic gains in antitumor activity. Finally, we highlight avenues for future preclinical research that might be taken in order to refine cell-virus biotherapeutics in preparation for human trials.

A product feature-based user-centric product search model

OpenAIRE

Ben Jabeur, Lamjed; Soulier, Laure; Tamine, Lynda; Mousset, Paul

2016-01-01

During the online shopping process, users would search for interesting products and quickly access those that fit with their needs among a long tail of similar or closely related products. Our contribution addresses head queries that are frequently submitted on e-commerce Web sites. Head queries usually target featured products with several variations, accessories, and complementary products. We present in this paper a product feature-based user-centric model for product search involving in a...

Data mining technique for fast retrieval of similar waveforms in Fusion massive databases

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Vega, J. [Asociacion EURATOM/CIEMAT Para Fusion, Madrid (Spain)], E-mail: jesus.vega@ciemat.es; Pereira, A.; Portas, A. [Asociacion EURATOM/CIEMAT Para Fusion, Madrid (Spain); Dormido-Canto, S.; Farias, G.; Dormido, R.; Sanchez, J.; Duro, N. [Departamento de Informatica y Automatica, UNED, Madrid (Spain); Santos, M. [Departamento de Arquitectura de Computadores y Automatica, UCM, Madrid (Spain); Sanchez, E. [Asociacion EURATOM/CIEMAT Para Fusion, Madrid (Spain); Pajares, G. [Departamento de Arquitectura de Computadores y Automatica, UCM, Madrid (Spain)

2008-01-15

Fusion measurement systems generate similar waveforms for reproducible behavior. A major difficulty related to data analysis is the identification, in a rapid and automated way, of a set of discharges with comparable behaviour, i.e. discharges with 'similar' waveforms. Here we introduce a new technique for rapid searching and retrieval of 'similar' signals. The approach consists of building a classification system that avoids traversing the whole database looking for similarities. The classification system diminishes the problem dimensionality (by means of waveform feature extraction) and reduces the searching space to just the most probable 'similar' waveforms (clustering techniques). In the searching procedure, the input waveform is classified in any of the existing clusters. Then, a similarity measure is computed between the input signal and all cluster elements in order to identify the most similar waveforms. The inner product of normalized vectors is used as the similarity measure as it allows the searching process to be independent of signal gain and polarity. This development has been applied recently to TJ-II stellarator databases and has been integrated into its remote participation system.

Psoriatic arthritis management update - biotherapeutic options.

LENUS (Irish Health Repository)

Saber, Tajvur P

2012-02-01

Psoriatic arthritis (PsA) is a seronegative spondyloarthropathy (SpA) occurring in up to 30% of patients with psoriasis. It has a wide variation of annual incidence (median 6.4, range 0.1-3.1 per 10(5) people), based on analysis of 13 incidence and prevalence reviews published between 1987 and December 2006. Conventional treatments with antiinflammatory and disease modifying or antirheumatic drugs are not efficacious in all patients, in particular those with axial disease. This review examines new pharmacological developments in the treatment of PsA with a focus on biologic therapies.

Trait similarity patterns within grass and grasshopper communities : Multitrophic community assembly at work

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van der Plas, F.; Anderson, T. M.; Olff, H.

Trait-based community assembly theory suggests that trait variation among co-occurring species is shaped by two main processes: abiotic filtering, important in stressful environments and promoting similarity, and competition, more important in productive environments and promoting dissimilarity.

Agile rediscovering values: Similarities to continuous improvement strategies

Science.gov (United States)

Díaz de Mera, P.; Arenas, J. M.; González, C.

2012-04-01

Research in the late 80's on technological companies that develop products of high value innovation, with sufficient speed and flexibility to adapt quickly to changing market conditions, gave rise to the new set of methodologies known as Agile Management Approach. In the current changing economic scenario, we considered very interesting to study the similarities of these Agile Methodologies with other practices whose effectiveness has been amply demonstrated in both the West and Japan. Strategies such as Kaizen, Lean, World Class Manufacturing, Concurrent Engineering, etc, would be analyzed to check the values they have in common with the Agile Approach.

Argentinean peanut sauce similar to mayonnaise: chemical, nutritional and sensorial aspects

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Guzmán, Carlos A.

2003-03-01

Full Text Available The purpose of this study was to prepare a dressing using blanched Argentinian peanuts, that looks like mayonnaise and that has a patterns of a healthy nourishment. The general composition of the product, as well as the fatty acid composition and stability to oxidation were determined and compared to standard commercial mayonnaise and sunflower oil. A consumer test was performed on the product. The results showed a better nutritional quality of the peanut mayonnaise, due to a lower fat and caloric contents and a higher mono-unsaturated proportion of fatty acids than the other dressings. This product contains fiber and vitamin E, it lacks cholesterol and is low in sodium. The stability to lipid oxidation was similar to that of standard commercial mayonnaise and sunflower oil. Concerning sensorial aspects, the product was well accepted by 71.7 % of the consumer panelists. It responds to healthy-food guidelines and can be used for various purposes.La propuesta de este estudio fue preparar un aderezo usando maní blanchado (pelado argentino, que tenga un aspecto similar a la mayonesa y que tenga características de un alimento sano. La composición porcentual, los ácidos grasos y la estabilidad oxidativa del producto fueron determinadas y comparadas con mayonesa comercial y aceite de girasol. Además un test de aceptabilidad fue realizado sobre dicho producto. Los resultados mostraron mejores cualidades nutricionales en la mayonesa de maní debido a que tiene un menor contenido calórico y graso y una mayor proporción de ácidos grasos monoinsaturados que los otros aderezos. Este producto contiene fibras y vitamina E, carece de colesterol y tiene baja concentración de sodio. La estabilidad oxidativa de los lípidos fue similar a la de la mayonesa comercial y al aceite de girasol. Respecto a sus propiedades sensoriales, la mayonesa de maní fue considerada aceptable por el 71,7 % de los consumidores. Este producto responde a las caracter

Chitosan-based delivery systems for protein therapeutics and antigens

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Amidi, M.; Mastrobattista, E.; Jiskoot, W.; Hennink, W.E.

Therapeutic peptides/proteins and protein-based antigens are chemically and structurally labile compounds, which are almost exclusively administered by parenteral injections. Recently, non-invasive mucosal routes have attracted interest for administration of these biotherapeutics. Chitosan-based

Gender similarities and differences.

Science.gov (United States)

Hyde, Janet Shibley

2014-01-01

Whether men and women are fundamentally different or similar has been debated for more than a century. This review summarizes major theories designed to explain gender differences: evolutionary theories, cognitive social learning theory, sociocultural theory, and expectancy-value theory. The gender similarities hypothesis raises the possibility of theorizing gender similarities. Statistical methods for the analysis of gender differences and similarities are reviewed, including effect sizes, meta-analysis, taxometric analysis, and equivalence testing. Then, relying mainly on evidence from meta-analyses, gender differences are reviewed in cognitive performance (e.g., math performance), personality and social behaviors (e.g., temperament, emotions, aggression, and leadership), and psychological well-being. The evidence on gender differences in variance is summarized. The final sections explore applications of intersectionality and directions for future research.

Extending the Similarity-Attraction Effect: The Effects of When-Similarity in Computer-Mediated Communication

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Kaptein, M.C.; Castaneda, D.; Fernandez, N.; Nass, C.

2014-01-01

The feeling of connectedness experienced in computer-mediated relationships can be explained by the similarity-attraction effect (SAE). Though SAE is well established in psychology, the effects of some types of similarity have not yet been explored. In 2 studies, we demonstrate similarity-attraction

Similarity or difference?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Villadsen, Anders Ryom

2013-01-01

While the organizational structures and strategies of public organizations have attracted substantial research attention among public management scholars, little research has explored how these organizational core dimensions are interconnected and influenced by pressures for similarity....... In this paper I address this topic by exploring the relation between expenditure strategy isomorphism and structure isomorphism in Danish municipalities. Different literatures suggest that organizations exist in concurrent pressures for being similar to and different from other organizations in their field......-shaped relation exists between expenditure strategy isomorphism and structure isomorphism in a longitudinal quantitative study of Danish municipalities....

Processes of Similarity Judgment

Science.gov (United States)

Larkey, Levi B.; Markman, Arthur B.

2005-01-01

Similarity underlies fundamental cognitive capabilities such as memory, categorization, decision making, problem solving, and reasoning. Although recent approaches to similarity appreciate the structure of mental representations, they differ in the processes posited to operate over these representations. We present an experiment that…

Judgments of brand similarity

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Bijmolt, THA; Wedel, M; Pieters, RGM; DeSarbo, WS

This paper provides empirical insight into the way consumers make pairwise similarity judgments between brands, and how familiarity with the brands, serial position of the pair in a sequence, and the presentation format affect these judgments. Within the similarity judgment process both the

Renewing the Respect for Similarity

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shimon eEdelman

2012-07-01

Full Text Available In psychology, the concept of similarity has traditionally evoked a mixture of respect, stemmingfrom its ubiquity and intuitive appeal, and concern, due to its dependence on the framing of the problemat hand and on its context. We argue for a renewed focus on similarity as an explanatory concept, bysurveying established results and new developments in the theory and methods of similarity-preservingassociative lookup and dimensionality reduction — critical components of many cognitive functions, aswell as of intelligent data management in computer vision. We focus in particular on the growing familyof algorithms that support associative memory by performing hashing that respects local similarity, andon the uses of similarity in representing structured objects and scenes. Insofar as these similarity-basedideas and methods are useful in cognitive modeling and in AI applications, they should be included inthe core conceptual toolkit of computational neuroscience.

Similarity of the ruminal bacteria across individual lactating cows.

Science.gov (United States)

Jami, Elie; Mizrahi, Itzhak

2012-06-01

Dairy cattle hold enormous significance for man as a source of milk and meat. Their remarkable ability to convert indigestible plant mass into these digestible food products resides in the rumen - an anaerobic chambered compartment - in the bovine digestive system. The rumen houses a complex microbiota which is responsible for the degradation of plant material, consequently enabling the conversion of plant fibers into milk and meat and determining their quality and quantity. Hence, an understanding of this complex ecosystem has major economic implications. One important question that is yet to be addressed is the degree of conservation of rumen microbial composition across individual animals. Here we quantified the degree of similarity between rumen bacterial populations of 16 individual cows. We used real-time PCR to determine the variance of specific ruminal bacterial species with different metabolic functions, revealing that while some bacterial strains vary greatly across animals, others show only very low variability. This variance could not be linked to the metabolic traits of these bacteria. We examined the degree of similarity in the dominant bacterial populations across all animals using automated ribosomal intergenic spacer analysis (ARISA), and identified a bacterial community consisting of 32% operational taxonomic units (OTUs) shared by at least 90% of the animals and 19% OTUs shared by 100% of the animals. Looking only at the presence or absence of each OTU gave an average similarity of 75% between each cow pair. When abundance of each OTU was added to the analysis, this similarity decreased to an average of less than 60%. Thus, as suggested in similar recent studies of the human gut, a bovine rumen core microbiome does exist, but taxa abundance may vary greatly across animals. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Self-similar continued root approximants

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Gluzman, S.; Yukalov, V.I.

2012-01-01

A novel method of summing asymptotic series is advanced. Such series repeatedly arise when employing perturbation theory in powers of a small parameter for complicated problems of condensed matter physics, statistical physics, and various applied problems. The method is based on the self-similar approximation theory involving self-similar root approximants. The constructed self-similar continued roots extrapolate asymptotic series to finite values of the expansion parameter. The self-similar continued roots contain, as a particular case, continued fractions and Padé approximants. A theorem on the convergence of the self-similar continued roots is proved. The method is illustrated by several examples from condensed-matter physics.

Computational prediction of drug-drug interactions based on drugs functional similarities.

Science.gov (United States)

Ferdousi, Reza; Safdari, Reza; Omidi, Yadollah

2017-06-01

Therapeutic activities of drugs are often influenced by co-administration of drugs that may cause inevitable drug-drug interactions (DDIs) and inadvertent side effects. Prediction and identification of DDIs are extremely vital for the patient safety and success of treatment modalities. A number of computational methods have been employed for the prediction of DDIs based on drugs structures and/or functions. Here, we report on a computational method for DDIs prediction based on functional similarity of drugs. The model was set based on key biological elements including carriers, transporters, enzymes and targets (CTET). The model was applied for 2189 approved drugs. For each drug, all the associated CTETs were collected, and the corresponding binary vectors were constructed to determine the DDIs. Various similarity measures were conducted to detect DDIs. Of the examined similarity methods, the inner product-based similarity measures (IPSMs) were found to provide improved prediction values. Altogether, 2,394,766 potential drug pairs interactions were studied. The model was able to predict over 250,000 unknown potential DDIs. Upon our findings, we propose the current method as a robust, yet simple and fast, universal in silico approach for identification of DDIs. We envision that this proposed method can be used as a practical technique for the detection of possible DDIs based on the functional similarities of drugs. Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier Inc.

GOssTo: a stand-alone application and a web tool for calculating semantic similarities on the Gene Ontology

OpenAIRE

Caniza, Horacio; Romero, Alfonso E.; Heron, Samuel; Yang, Haixuan; Devoto, Alessandra; Frasca, Marco; Mesiti, Marco; Valentini, Giorgio; Paccanaro, Alberto

2014-01-01

Summary: We present GOssTo, the Gene Ontology semantic similarity Tool, a user-friendly software system for calculating semantic similarities between gene products according to the Gene Ontology. GOssTo is bundled with six semantic similarity measures, including both term- and graph-based measures, and has extension capabilities to allow the user to add new similarities. Importantly, for any measure, GOssTo can also calculate the Random Walk Contribution that has been shown to greatly improve...

Personalized recommendation with corrected similarity

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Zhu, Xuzhen; Tian, Hui; Cai, Shimin

2014-01-01

Personalized recommendation has attracted a surge of interdisciplinary research. Especially, similarity-based methods in applications of real recommendation systems have achieved great success. However, the computations of similarities are overestimated or underestimated, in particular because of the defective strategy of unidirectional similarity estimation. In this paper, we solve this drawback by leveraging mutual correction of forward and backward similarity estimations, and propose a new personalized recommendation index, i.e., corrected similarity based inference (CSI). Through extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, the results show a greater improvement of CSI in comparison with these mainstream baselines. And a detailed analysis is presented to unveil and understand the origin of such difference between CSI and mainstream indices. (paper)

Porcine granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (G-CSF) delivered via replication-defective adenovirus induces a sustained increase in circulating peripheral blood neutrophils

Science.gov (United States)

The use of immunomodulators is a promising area for biotherapeutic, prophylactic, and metaphylactic use to prevent and combat infectious disease, particularly during periods of peak disease incidence. Cytokines, including granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF), are one class of compounds that...

Visual Fashion-Product Search at SK Planet

OpenAIRE

Kim, Taewan; Kim, Seyeong; Na, Sangil; Kim, Hayoon; Kim, Moonki; Jeon, Byoung-Ki

2016-01-01

We build a large-scale visual search system which finds similar product images given a fashion item. Defining similarity among arbitrary fashion-products is still remains a challenging problem, even there is no exact ground-truth. To resolve this problem, we define more than 90 fashion-related attributes, and combination of these attributes can represent thousands of unique fashion-styles. The fashion-attributes are one of the ingredients to define semantic similarity among fashion-product im...

Formulary decision-making about cephalosporins with similar therapeutic uses.

Science.gov (United States)

Mabe, Don M

2003-05-15

The various costs and intangible factors that enter into formulary decisions in an era of increasingly frequent drug product shortages that can adversely affect patient care and increase treatment costs are described. Pharmacy administration at Carolinas HealthCare System analyzed the costs associated with making a formulary switch from the third-generation cephalosporin ceftriaxone to cefotaxime, which recently became available in generic form and has a similar spectrum of antimicrobial activity and therapeutic uses. Hard dollar costs for purchasing drugs and the supplies needed to administer them; soft dollar costs for staff time spent acquiring, preparing, and administering doses; and intangible factors were considered. A reliable supply of drug product from the manufacturer was an important intangible factor because of frequent drug shortages in the past few years and the adverse effect on patient care and the increased soft dollar costs associated with these shortages. Administrators at Carolinas HealthCare System decided not to make the proposed formulary change after weighing the many factors and costs.

Similar or different?: the importance of similarities and differences for support between siblings

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Voorpostel, M.; van der Lippe, T.; Dykstra, P.A.; Flap, H.

2007-01-01

Using a large-scale Dutch national sample (N = 7,126), the authors examine the importance of similarities and differences in the sibling dyad for the provision of support. Similarities are assumed to enhance attraction and empathy; differences are assumed to be related to different possibilities for

Similar or Different? The Importance of Similarities and Differences for Support Between Siblings

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Voorpostel, Marieke; Lippe, Tanja van der; Dykstra, Pearl A.; Flap, Henk

2007-01-01

Using a large-scale Dutch national sample (N = 7,126), the authors examine the importance of similarities and differences in the sibling dyad for the provision of support. Similarities are assumed to enhance attraction and empathy; differences are assumed to be related to different possibilities for

Being similar while judging right and wrong: The effects of personal and situational similarity on moral judgements.

Science.gov (United States)

Pascal, Emilia

2017-07-20

This study investigated the effects of similarity with the transgressor and the victim on the perceived immorality of the transgression. Participants read two stories describing a person that cheated on their partner and a police officer that mistreated somebody. In the first story we manipulated participants' personal similarity to the transgressor and in the second their personal similarity to the victim. In each story, participants' past situational similarity to the target character was assessed according to their previous experiences of being in the same position. Results show that both personal and past situational similarity to the transgressor determine less severe moral judgements, while personal and past situational similarity with the victim have the opposite effect. We also tested several potential mediators of these effects, derived from competing theoretical accounts of the influence of similarity on perceived responsibility. Empathy emerged as mediating most of the effects of similarity on moral judgements, except those induced by past situational similarity with the victim. The foreseen probability of being in a similar situation mediated only the effects of similarity to the transgressor, and not those of similarity to the victim. Overall, results highlight the complex mechanisms of the influences of similarity on moral judgements. © 2017 International Union of Psychological Science.

Self-similar cosmological models

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Chao, W Z [Cambridge Univ. (UK). Dept. of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics

1981-07-01

The kinematics and dynamics of self-similar cosmological models are discussed. The degrees of freedom of the solutions of Einstein's equations for different types of models are listed. The relation between kinematic quantities and the classifications of the self-similarity group is examined. All dust local rotational symmetry models have been found.

Convincing similar and dissimilar others: the power of language abstraction in political communication.

Science.gov (United States)

Menegatti, Michela; Rubini, Monica

2013-05-01

Three studies examined the production of political messages and their persuasive impact on recipients as a function of speaker-audience similarity. The first two studies found support for the hypothesis that political leaders (Study 1) and party activists (Study 2) formulate more abstract messages when the audience is politically similar to them than when the audience is dissimilar or heterogeneous. The third study examined the persuasive impact of message abstractness versus concreteness. We predicted and found that abstract messages are more effective in convincing an audience whose political positions are similar to the speaker's and concrete messages are more effective in convincing an audience whose political positions differ from the speaker's or are heterogeneous. Implications of these findings for the relation between language and social cognition are discussed.

Technological Similarity, Post-acquisition R&D Reorganization, and Innovation Performance in Horizontal Acquisition

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Colombo, Massimo G.; Rabbiosi, Larissa

2014-01-01

This paper aims to disentangle the mechanisms through which technological similarity between acquiring and acquired firms influences innovation in horizontal acquisitions. We develop a theoretical model that links technological similarity to: (i) two key aspects of post-acquisition reorganization...... of acquired R&D operations – the rationalization of the R&D operations and the replacement of the R&D top manager, and (ii) two intermediate effects that are closely associated with the post-acquisition innovation performance of the combined firm – improvements in R&D productivity and disruptions in R......&D personnel. We rely on PLS techniques to test our theoretical model using detailed information on 31 horizontal acquisitions in high- and medium-tech industries. Our results indicate that in horizontal acquisitions, technological similarity negatively affects post-acquisition innovation performance...

Similarity increases altruistic punishment in humans.

Science.gov (United States)

Mussweiler, Thomas; Ockenfels, Axel

2013-11-26

Humans are attracted to similar others. As a consequence, social networks are homogeneous in sociodemographic, intrapersonal, and other characteristics--a principle called homophily. Despite abundant evidence showing the importance of interpersonal similarity and homophily for human relationships, their behavioral correlates and cognitive foundations are poorly understood. Here, we show that perceived similarity substantially increases altruistic punishment, a key mechanism underlying human cooperation. We induced (dis)similarity perception by manipulating basic cognitive mechanisms in an economic cooperation game that included a punishment phase. We found that similarity-focused participants were more willing to punish others' uncooperative behavior. This influence of similarity is not explained by group identity, which has the opposite effect on altruistic punishment. Our findings demonstrate that pure similarity promotes reciprocity in ways known to encourage cooperation. At the same time, the increased willingness to punish norm violations among similarity-focused participants provides a rationale for why similar people are more likely to build stable social relationships. Finally, our findings show that altruistic punishment is differentially involved in encouraging cooperation under pure similarity vs. in-group conditions.

9 CFR 319.310 - Lima beans with ham in sauce, beans with ham in sauce, beans with bacon in sauce, and similar...

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 9 Animals and Animal Products 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Lima beans with ham in sauce, beans with ham in sauce, beans with bacon in sauce, and similar products. 319.310 Section 319.310 Animals and....310 Lima beans with ham in sauce, beans with ham in sauce, beans with bacon in sauce, and similar...

Biogenic oxidized organic functional groups in aerosol particles from a mountain forest site and their similarities to laboratory chamber products

Science.gov (United States)

Schwartz, R. E.; Russell, L. M.; Sjostedt, S. J.; Vlasenko, A.; Slowik, J. G.; Abbatt, J. P. D.; MacDonald, A. M.; Li, S. M.; Liggio, J.; Toom-Sauntry, D.; Leaitch, W. R.

2010-06-01

Submicron particles collected at Whistler, British Columbia, at 1020 m a.s.l. during May and June 2008 on Teflon filters were analyzed by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) techniques for organic functional groups (OFG) and elemental composition. Organic mass (OM) concentrations ranged from less than 0.5 to 3.1 μg m-3, with a project mean and standard deviation of 1.3±1.0 μg m-3 and 0.21±0.16 μg m-3 for OM and sulfate, respectively. On average, organic hydroxyl, alkane, and carboxylic acid groups represented 34%, 33%, and 23% of OM, respectively. Ketone, amine and organosulfate groups constituted 6%, 5%, and volatile organic compounds (VOC), including isoprene and monoterpenes from biogenic VOC (BVOC) emissions and their oxidation products (methyl-vinylketone / methacrolein, MVK/MACR), were made using co-located proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS). We present chemically-specific evidence of OFG associated with BVOC emissions. Positive matrix factorization (PMF) analysis attributed 65% of the campaign OM to biogenic sources, based on the correlations of one factor to monoterpenes and MVK/MACR. The remaining fraction was attributed to anthropogenic sources based on a correlation to sulfate. The functional group composition of the biogenic factor (consisting of 32% alkane, 25% carboxylic acid, 21% organic hydroxyl, 16% ketone, and 6% amine groups) was similar to that of secondary organic aerosol (SOA) reported from the oxidation of BVOCs in laboratory chamber studies, providing evidence that the magnitude and chemical composition of biogenic SOA simulated in the laboratory is similar to that found in actual atmospheric conditions. The biogenic factor OM is also correlated to dust elements, indicating that dust may act as a non-acidic SOA sink. This role is supported by the organic functional group composition and morphology of single particles, which were analyzed by scanning transmission X-ray microscopy near edge X

Dealing with immunogenicity of biologicals: assessment and clinical relevance

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Wolbink, Gerrit J.; Aarden, Lucien A.; Dijkmans, B. A. C.

2009-01-01

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: In the last decade, biologicals revolutionized rheumatology. An increasing number of patients benefit from biotherapeuticals. However, some patients do not respond to treatment and others lose their response after a certain time. Immunogenicity is one of the factors linked to

Testing Self-Similarity Through Lamperti Transformations

KAUST Repository

Lee, Myoungji

2016-07-14

Self-similar processes have been widely used in modeling real-world phenomena occurring in environmetrics, network traffic, image processing, and stock pricing, to name but a few. The estimation of the degree of self-similarity has been studied extensively, while statistical tests for self-similarity are scarce and limited to processes indexed in one dimension. This paper proposes a statistical hypothesis test procedure for self-similarity of a stochastic process indexed in one dimension and multi-self-similarity for a random field indexed in higher dimensions. If self-similarity is not rejected, our test provides a set of estimated self-similarity indexes. The key is to test stationarity of the inverse Lamperti transformations of the process. The inverse Lamperti transformation of a self-similar process is a strongly stationary process, revealing a theoretical connection between the two processes. To demonstrate the capability of our test, we test self-similarity of fractional Brownian motions and sheets, their time deformations and mixtures with Gaussian white noise, and the generalized Cauchy family. We also apply the self-similarity test to real data: annual minimum water levels of the Nile River, network traffic records, and surface heights of food wrappings. © 2016, International Biometric Society.

PECULIARITIES OF GENERALIZATION OF SIMILAR PHENOMENA IN THE PROCESS OF FISH HEAT TREATMENT

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

V. A. Pokhol’chenko

2015-01-01

Full Text Available The theoretical presuppositions for the possibility of generalizing and similarity founding in dehydration and wet materials heating processes are studieded in this article. It is offered to carry out the given processes generalization by using dimensionless numbers of similarity. At the detailed analyzing of regularities of heat treatment processes of fish in different modes a significant amount of experienced material was successfully generalized on the basis of dimensionless simplex (similarity numbers. Using the dimensionless simplex allowed to detect a number of simple mathematical models for the studied phenomena. The generalized kinetic models of fish dehydration, the generalized dynamic models (changing moisture diffusion coefficients, the generalized kinetic models of fish heating (the temperature field changing in the products thickness, average volume and center were founded. These generalized mathematical models showed also relationship of dehydration and heating at the processes of fish semi-hot, hot smoking (drying and frying. The relationship of the results from the physical nature of the dehydration process, including a change in the binding energy of the moisture with the material to the extent of the process and the shrinkage impact on the rate of the product moisture removal is given in the article. The factors influencing the internal structure and properties of the raw material changing and retarding the dehydration processes are described there. There was a heating rate dependence of fish products on the chemical composition the geometric dimensions of the object of heating and on the coolant regime parameters. A unique opportunity is opened by using the generalized models, combined with empirically derived equations and the technique of engineering calculation of these processes, to design a rational modes of heat treatment of raw materials and to optimize the performance of thermal equipment.

Greening Non-Product-Related Procurement

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mosgaard, Mette; Riisgaard, Henrik; Huulgaard, Rikke Dorothea

2013-01-01

link to the strategy for greening private consumption, as similarities exist and the purchasers lean on their private experiences when purchasing non-product related items; and finally, 3) Intensify the efforts in product categories in which strict normative legislation makes management more motivated....... environmental benefits of millions of procurement decisions do add up to large environmental improvement potentials. Thus, non-product-related procurement focuses on the similarities in the purchases made across different sectors. Explorative interviews with purchasers in Danish companies form the basis...

Perspective on a Modified Developmental and Reproductive Toxicity Testing Strategy for Cancer Immunotherapy.

Science.gov (United States)

Prell, Rodney A; Halpern, Wendy G; Rao, Gautham K

2016-05-01

The intent of cancer immunotherapy (CIT) is to generate and enhance T-cell responses against tumors. The tumor microenvironment establishes several inhibitory pathways that lead to suppression of the local immune response, which is permissive for tumor growth. The efficacy of different CITs, alone and in combination, stems from reinvigorating the tumor immune response via several mechanisms, including costimulatory agonists, checkpoint inhibitors, and vaccines. However, immune responses to other antigens (self and foreign) may also be enhanced, resulting in potentially undesired effects. In outbred mammalian pregnancies, the fetus expresses paternally derived alloantigens that are recognized as foreign by the maternal immune system. If unchecked or enhanced, maternal immunity to these alloantigens represents a developmental and reproductive risk and thus is a general liability for cancer immunotherapeutic molecules. We propose a tiered approach to confirm this mechanistic reproductive liability for CIT molecules. A rodent allopregnancy model is based on breeding 2 different strains of mice so that paternally derived alloantigens are expressed by the fetus. When tested with a cross-reactive biotherapeutic, small molecule drug, or surrogate molecule, this model should reveal on-target reproductive liabilities if the pathway is involved in maintaining pregnancy. Alternatively, allopregnancy models with genetically modified mice can be interrogated for exquisitely specific biotherapeutics with restricted species reactivity. The allopregnancy model represents a relatively straightforward approach to confirm an expected on-target reproductive risk for CIT molecules. For biotherapeutics, it could potentially replace more complex developmental and reproductive toxicity testing in nonhuman primates when a pregnancy hazard is confirmed or expected. © The Author(s) 2016.

Molecular basis sets - a general similarity-based approach for representing chemical spaces.

Science.gov (United States)

Raghavendra, Akshay S; Maggiora, Gerald M

2007-01-01

A new method, based on generalized Fourier analysis, is described that utilizes the concept of "molecular basis sets" to represent chemical space within an abstract vector space. The basis vectors in this space are abstract molecular vectors. Inner products among the basis vectors are determined using an ansatz that associates molecular similarities between pairs of molecules with their corresponding inner products. Moreover, the fact that similarities between pairs of molecules are, in essentially all cases, nonzero implies that the abstract molecular basis vectors are nonorthogonal, but since the similarity of a molecule with itself is unity, the molecular vectors are normalized to unity. A symmetric orthogonalization procedure, which optimally preserves the character of the original set of molecular basis vectors, is used to construct appropriate orthonormal basis sets. Molecules can then be represented, in general, by sets of orthonormal "molecule-like" basis vectors within a proper Euclidean vector space. However, the dimension of the space can become quite large. Thus, the work presented here assesses the effect of basis set size on a number of properties including the average squared error and average norm of molecular vectors represented in the space-the results clearly show the expected reduction in average squared error and increase in average norm as the basis set size is increased. Several distance-based statistics are also considered. These include the distribution of distances and their differences with respect to basis sets of differing size and several comparative distance measures such as Spearman rank correlation and Kruscal stress. All of the measures show that, even though the dimension can be high, the chemical spaces they represent, nonetheless, behave in a well-controlled and reasonable manner. Other abstract vector spaces analogous to that described here can also be constructed providing that the appropriate inner products can be directly

2012 AAPS National Biotech Conference Open Forum: a perspective on the current state of immunogenicity prediction and risk management.

Science.gov (United States)

Rajadhyaksha, Manoj; Subramanyam, Meena; Rup, Bonnie

2013-10-01

The immunogenicity profile of a biotherapeutic is determined by multiple product-, process- or manufacturing-, patient- and treatment-related factors and the bioanalytical methodology used to monitor for immunogenicity. This creates a complex situation that limits direct correlation of individual factors to observed immunogenicity rates. Therefore, mechanistic understanding of how these factors individually or in concert could influence the overall incidence and clinical risk of immunogenicity is crucial to provide the best benefit/risk profile for a given biotherapeutic in a given indication and to inform risk mitigation strategies. Advances in the field of immunogenicity have included development of best practices for monitoring anti-drug antibody development, categorization of risk factors contributing to immunogenicity, development of predictive tools, and development of effective strategies for risk management and mitigation. Thus, the opportunity to ask "where we are now and where we would like to go from here?" was the main driver for organizing an Open Forum on Improving Immunogenicity Risk Prediction and Management, conducted at the 2012 American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists' (AAPS) National Biotechnology Conference in San Diego. The main objectives of the Forum include the following: to understand the nature of immunogenicity risk factors, to identify analytical tools used and animal models and management strategies needed to improve their predictive value, and finally to identify collaboration opportunities to improve the reliability of risk prediction, mitigation, and management. This meeting report provides the Forum participant's and author's perspectives on the barriers to advancing this field and recommendations for overcoming these barriers through collaborative efforts.

Quasi-equilibria and plasma chemical similarity in non-isothermal reactive plasmas

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Miethke, F.; Rutscher, A.; Wagner, H.E.

2000-01-01

With regard to the output of stable products the mode of operation of non-isothermal plasma chemical reactors shows physical and chemical well defined states, which represent limiting cases and may be interpreted as quasi-equilibrium states. The occurrence and the characteristics of these states, meanwhile more than once observed and described, are demonstrated by an instructive model reaction. Within the frame of the so-called Macroscopic Kinetics a central parameter is dominating the reactor operation. This result may be generalized and is linked up to the application of similarity principles for the reactor operation. After the general formulation of such principles, starting from the balance equations of particles and energy, a dimensionless similarity parameter is formulated, characterizing the composition of the effluent gas of the reactor. The applicability of this parameter is demonstrated by experimental examples. (Authors)

Principles of cancer biotherapy

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Oldham, R.K.

1987-01-01

This book contains 20 selections. Some of the titles are: Biotherapeutic Agents Obtained by Recombinant DNA Methods; Imaging and Therapy of Metastatic Carcinoma with Radiolabeled Monoclonal Antibodies; Oncogenes and Growth Factors in Cancer; Development of Cancer Epitope Vaccines; and Speculations for the 1990s

77 FR 22622 - AP Henderson Group, BPO Management Services, Inc., Capital Mineral Investors, Inc...

Science.gov (United States)

2012-04-16

... SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION [File No. 500-1] AP Henderson Group, BPO Management Services, Inc., Capital Mineral Investors, Inc., CardioVascular BioTherapeutics, Inc., and 1st Centennial... that there is a lack of current and accurate information concerning the securities of 1st Centennial...

Design of compound libraries based on natural product scaffolds and protein structure similarity clustering (PSSC)

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Balamurugan, Rengarajan; Dekker, Frank J; Waldmann, Herbert; Dekker, Frans

Recent advances in structural biology, bioinformatics and combinatorial chemistry have significantly impacted the discovery of small molecules that modulate protein functions. Natural products which have evolved to bind to proteins may serve as biologically validated starting points for the design

Similar Transition States Mediate the Q-cycle and Superoxide Production by the Cytochrome bc1 Complex

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Forquer, Isaac P.; Covian, Raul; Bowman, Michael K.; Trumpower, Bernard; Kramer, David M.

2006-01-01

The cytochrome bc complexes found in mitochondria, chloroplasts and many bacteria catalyze a critical reaction in their respective electron transport chains. The quinol oxidase (Qo) site in this complex oxidizes a hydroquinone (quinol), reducing two one-electron carriers, a low-potential cytochrome b heme and a ''Rieske'' iron-sulfur cluster. The overall electron transfer reactions are coupled to transmembrane translocation of protons via a ''Q-cycle'' mechanism, which generates proton motive force for ATP synthesis. Since semiquinone intermediates of quinol oxidation are generally highly reactive, one of the key questions in this field is: how does the Qo site oxidize quinol without the production of deleterious side reactions including superoxide production? We attempt to test three possible general models to account for this behavior: (1) The Qo site semiquinone (or quinol:imidazolate complex) is unstable and thus occurs at a very low steady-state concentration, limiting O2 reduction; (2) the Qo site semiquinone is highly stabilized making it unreactive towards oxygen; and (3) the Qo site catalyzes a quantum mechanically-coupled two-electron/two proton transfer without a semiquinone intermediate. Enthalpies of activation were found to be almost identical between the uninhibited Q-cycle and superoxide production in the presence of Antimycin A in wild type. This behavior was also preserved in a series of mutants with altered driving forces for quinol oxidation. Overall, the data supports models where the rate-limiting step for both Q-cycle and superoxide production are essentially identical, consistent with model 1 but requiring modifications to models 2 and 3

IntelliGO: a new vector-based semantic similarity measure including annotation origin

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Devignes Marie-Dominique

2010-12-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background The Gene Ontology (GO is a well known controlled vocabulary describing the biological process, molecular function and cellular component aspects of gene annotation. It has become a widely used knowledge source in bioinformatics for annotating genes and measuring their semantic similarity. These measures generally involve the GO graph structure, the information content of GO aspects, or a combination of both. However, only a few of the semantic similarity measures described so far can handle GO annotations differently according to their origin (i.e. their evidence codes. Results We present here a new semantic similarity measure called IntelliGO which integrates several complementary properties in a novel vector space model. The coefficients associated with each GO term that annotates a given gene or protein include its information content as well as a customized value for each type of GO evidence code. The generalized cosine similarity measure, used for calculating the dot product between two vectors, has been rigorously adapted to the context of the GO graph. The IntelliGO similarity measure is tested on two benchmark datasets consisting of KEGG pathways and Pfam domains grouped as clans, considering the GO biological process and molecular function terms, respectively, for a total of 683 yeast and human genes and involving more than 67,900 pair-wise comparisons. The ability of the IntelliGO similarity measure to express the biological cohesion of sets of genes compares favourably to four existing similarity measures. For inter-set comparison, it consistently discriminates between distinct sets of genes. Furthermore, the IntelliGO similarity measure allows the influence of weights assigned to evidence codes to be checked. Finally, the results obtained with a complementary reference technique give intermediate but correct correlation values with the sequence similarity, Pfam, and Enzyme classifications when compared to

Fast Schemes for Computing Similarities between Gaussian HMMs and Their Applications in Texture Image Classification

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Chen Ling

2005-01-01

Full Text Available An appropriate definition and efficient computation of similarity (or distance measures between two stochastic models are of theoretical and practical interest. In this work, a similarity measure, that is, a modified "generalized probability product kernel," of Gaussian hidden Markov models is introduced. Two efficient schemes for computing this similarity measure are presented. The first scheme adopts a forward procedure analogous to the approach commonly used in probability evaluation of observation sequences on HMMs. The second scheme is based on the specially defined similarity transition matrix of two Gaussian hidden Markov models. Two scaling procedures are also proposed to solve the out-of-precision problem in the implementation. The effectiveness of the proposed methods has been evaluated on simulated observations with predefined model parameters, and on natural texture images. Promising experimental results have been observed.

Anaerobic Probiotics: The Key Microbes for Human Health.

Science.gov (United States)

El Enshasy, Hesham; Malik, Khairuddin; Malek, Roslinda Abd; Othman, Nor Zalina; Elsayed, Elsayed Ahmed; Wadaan, Mohammad

Human gastrointestinal microbiota (HGIM) incorporate a large number of microbes from different species. Anaerobic bacteria are the dominant organisms in this microbial consortium and play a crucial role in human health. In addition to their functional role as the main source of many essential metabolites for human health, they are considered as biotherapeutic agents in the regulation of different human metabolites. They are also important in the prevention and in the treatment of different physical and mental diseases. Bifidobacteria are the dominant anaerobic bacteria in HGIM and are widely used in the development of probiotic products for infants, children and adults. To develop bifidobacteria-based bioproducts, therefore, it is necessary to develop a large-scale biomass production platform based on a good understanding of the ideal medium and bioprocessing parameters for their growth and viability. In addition, high cell viability should be maintained during downstream processing and storage of probiotic cell powder or the final formulated product. In this work we review the latest information about the biology, therapeutic activities, cultivation and industrial production of bifidobacteria.

A Consensus Genome-scale Reconstruction of Chinese Hamster Ovary Cell Metabolism

KAUST Repository

Hefzi, Hooman

2016-11-23

Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells dominate biotherapeutic protein production and are widely used in mammalian cell line engineering research. To elucidate metabolic bottlenecks in protein production and to guide cell engineering and bioprocess optimization, we reconstructed the metabolic pathways in CHO and associated them with >1,700 genes in the Cricetulus griseus genome. The genome-scale metabolic model based on this reconstruction, iCHO1766, and cell-line-specific models for CHO-K1, CHO-S, and CHO-DG44 cells provide the biochemical basis of growth and recombinant protein production. The models accurately predict growth phenotypes and known auxotrophies in CHO cells. With the models, we quantify the protein synthesis capacity of CHO cells and demonstrate that common bioprocess treatments, such as histone deacetylase inhibitors, inefficiently increase product yield. However, our simulations show that the metabolic resources in CHO are more than three times more efficiently utilized for growth or recombinant protein synthesis following targeted efforts to engineer the CHO secretory pathway. This model will further accelerate CHO cell engineering and help optimize bioprocesses.

Self-similar compression of a magnetized plasma filled liner

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Felber, F.S.; Liberman, M.A.; Velikovich, A.L.

1985-01-01

New analytic, one-dimensional, self-similar solutions of magnetohydrodynamic equations describing the compression of a magnetized plasma by a thin cylindrical liner are presented. The solutions include several features that have not been included in an earlier self-similar solution of the equations of ideal magnetohydrodynamics. These features are the effects of finite plasma electrical conductivity, induction heating, thermal conductivity and related thermogalvanomagnetic effects, plasma turbulence, and plasma boundary effects. These solutions have been motivated by recent suggestions for production of ultrahigh magnetic fields by new methods. The methods involve radially imploding plasmas in which axial magnetic fields have been entrained. These methods may be capable of producing controlled magnetic fields up to approx. = 100 MG. Specific methods of implosion suggested were by ablative radial acceleration of a liner by a laser and by a gas-puff Z pinch. The model presented here addresses the first of these methods. The solutions derived here are used to estimate magnetic flux losses out of the compression volume, and to indicate conditions under which an impulsively-accelerated, plasma-filled liner may compress an axial magnetic field to large magnitude

Domain similarity based orthology detection.

Science.gov (United States)

Bitard-Feildel, Tristan; Kemena, Carsten; Greenwood, Jenny M; Bornberg-Bauer, Erich

2015-05-13

Orthologous protein detection software mostly uses pairwise comparisons of amino-acid sequences to assert whether two proteins are orthologous or not. Accordingly, when the number of sequences for comparison increases, the number of comparisons to compute grows in a quadratic order. A current challenge of bioinformatic research, especially when taking into account the increasing number of sequenced organisms available, is to make this ever-growing number of comparisons computationally feasible in a reasonable amount of time. We propose to speed up the detection of orthologous proteins by using strings of domains to characterize the proteins. We present two new protein similarity measures, a cosine and a maximal weight matching score based on domain content similarity, and new software, named porthoDom. The qualities of the cosine and the maximal weight matching similarity measures are compared against curated datasets. The measures show that domain content similarities are able to correctly group proteins into their families. Accordingly, the cosine similarity measure is used inside porthoDom, the wrapper developed for proteinortho. porthoDom makes use of domain content similarity measures to group proteins together before searching for orthologs. By using domains instead of amino acid sequences, the reduction of the search space decreases the computational complexity of an all-against-all sequence comparison. We demonstrate that representing and comparing proteins as strings of discrete domains, i.e. as a concatenation of their unique identifiers, allows a drastic simplification of search space. porthoDom has the advantage of speeding up orthology detection while maintaining a degree of accuracy similar to proteinortho. The implementation of porthoDom is released using python and C++ languages and is available under the GNU GPL licence 3 at http://www.bornberglab.org/pages/porthoda .

Measuring transferring similarity via local information

Science.gov (United States)

Yin, Likang; Deng, Yong

2018-05-01

Recommender systems have developed along with the web science, and how to measure the similarity between users is crucial for processing collaborative filtering recommendation. Many efficient models have been proposed (i.g., the Pearson coefficient) to measure the direct correlation. However, the direct correlation measures are greatly affected by the sparsity of dataset. In other words, the direct correlation measures would present an inauthentic similarity if two users have a very few commonly selected objects. Transferring similarity overcomes this drawback by considering their common neighbors (i.e., the intermediates). Yet, the transferring similarity also has its drawback since it can only provide the interval of similarity. To break the limitations, we propose the Belief Transferring Similarity (BTS) model. The contributions of BTS model are: (1) BTS model addresses the issue of the sparsity of dataset by considering the high-order similarity. (2) BTS model transforms uncertain interval to a certain state based on fuzzy systems theory. (3) BTS model is able to combine the transferring similarity of different intermediates using information fusion method. Finally, we compare BTS models with nine different link prediction methods in nine different networks, and we also illustrate the convergence property and efficiency of the BTS model.

Development of similarity theory for control systems

Science.gov (United States)

Myshlyaev, L. P.; Evtushenko, V. F.; Ivushkin, K. A.; Makarov, G. V.

2018-05-01

The area of effective application of the traditional similarity theory and the need necessity of its development for systems are discussed. The main statements underlying the similarity theory of control systems are given. The conditions for the similarity of control systems and the need for similarity control control are formulated. Methods and algorithms for estimating and similarity control of control systems and the results of research of control systems based on their similarity are presented. The similarity control of systems includes the current evaluation of the degree of similarity of control systems and the development of actions controlling similarity, and the corresponding targeted change in the state of any element of control systems.

Biogenic oxidized organic functional groups in aerosol particles from a mountain forest site and their similarities to laboratory chamber products

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

R. E. Schwartz

2010-06-01

Full Text Available Submicron particles collected at Whistler, British Columbia, at 1020 m a.s.l. during May and June 2008 on Teflon filters were analyzed by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR and X-ray fluorescence (XRF techniques for organic functional groups (OFG and elemental composition. Organic mass (OM concentrations ranged from less than 0.5 to 3.1 μg m⁻³, with a project mean and standard deviation of 1.3±1.0 μg m⁻³ and 0.21±0.16 μg m⁻³ for OM and sulfate, respectively. On average, organic hydroxyl, alkane, and carboxylic acid groups represented 34%, 33%, and 23% of OM, respectively. Ketone, amine and organosulfate groups constituted 6%, 5%, and <1% of the average organic aerosol composition, respectively. Measurements of volatile organic compounds (VOC, including isoprene and monoterpenes from biogenic VOC (BVOC emissions and their oxidation products (methyl-vinylketone / methacrolein, MVK/MACR, were made using co-located proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS. We present chemically-specific evidence of OFG associated with BVOC emissions. Positive matrix factorization (PMF analysis attributed 65% of the campaign OM to biogenic sources, based on the correlations of one factor to monoterpenes and MVK/MACR. The remaining fraction was attributed to anthropogenic sources based on a correlation to sulfate. The functional group composition of the biogenic factor (consisting of 32% alkane, 25% carboxylic acid, 21% organic hydroxyl, 16% ketone, and 6% amine groups was similar to that of secondary organic aerosol (SOA reported from the oxidation of BVOCs in laboratory chamber studies, providing evidence that the magnitude and chemical composition of biogenic SOA simulated in the laboratory is similar to that found in actual atmospheric conditions. The biogenic factor OM is also correlated to dust elements, indicating that dust may act as a non-acidic SOA sink. This role is supported by the organic functional

Similarity Structure of Wave-Collapse

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Rypdal, Kristoffer; Juul Rasmussen, Jens; Thomsen, Kenneth

1985-01-01

Similarity transformations of the cubic Schrödinger equation (CSE) are investigated. The transformations are used to remove the explicit time variation in the CSE and reduce it to differential equations in the spatial variables only. Two different methods for similarity reduction are employed and...

Productivity

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Spring, Martin; Johnes, Geraint; Hald, Kim Sundtoft

Productivity is increasingly critical for developed economies. It has always been important: as Paul Krugman puts it, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability...... to raise its output per worker”(Krugman, 1994). Analyses of productivity have, by and large, been the preserve of economists. Operations Management (OM) is rooted in a similar concern for the efficient use of scarce resources; Management Accounting (MA) is concerned with the institutionalised measurement...... and management of productivity. Yet the three perspectives are rarely connected. This paper is a sketch of a literature review seeking to identify, contrast and reconcile these three perspectives. In so doing, it aims to strengthen the connections between policy and managerial analyses of productivity....

Similar or different? The role of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in similarity detection.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Béatrice Garcin

Full Text Available Patients with frontal lobe syndrome can exhibit two types of abnormal behaviour when asked to place a banana and an orange in a single category: some patients categorize them at a concrete level (e.g., "both have peel", while others continue to look for differences between these objects (e.g., "one is yellow, the other is orange". These observations raise the question of whether abstraction and similarity detection are distinct processes involved in abstract categorization, and that depend on separate areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC. We designed an original experimental paradigm for a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI study involving healthy subjects, confirming the existence of two distinct processes relying on different prefrontal areas, and thus explaining the behavioural dissociation in frontal lesion patients. We showed that: 1 Similarity detection involves the anterior ventrolateral PFC bilaterally with a right-left asymmetry: the right anterior ventrolateral PFC is only engaged in detecting physical similarities; 2 Abstraction per se activates the left dorsolateral PFC.

Marriage Matters: Spousal Similarity in Life Satisfaction

OpenAIRE

Ulrich Schimmack; Richard Lucas

2006-01-01

Examined the concurrent and cross-lagged spousal similarity in life satisfaction over a 21-year period. Analyses were based on married couples (N = 847) in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Concurrent spousal similarity was considerably higher than one-year retest similarity, revealing spousal similarity in the variable component of life satisfac-tion. Spousal similarity systematically decreased with length of retest interval, revealing simi-larity in the changing component of life sati...

Information filtering based on transferring similarity.

Science.gov (United States)

Sun, Duo; Zhou, Tao; Liu, Jian-Guo; Liu, Run-Ran; Jia, Chun-Xiao; Wang, Bing-Hong

2009-07-01

In this Brief Report, we propose an index of user similarity, namely, the transferring similarity, which involves all high-order similarities between users. Accordingly, we design a modified collaborative filtering algorithm, which provides remarkably higher accurate predictions than the standard collaborative filtering. More interestingly, we find that the algorithmic performance will approach its optimal value when the parameter, contained in the definition of transferring similarity, gets close to its critical value, before which the series expansion of transferring similarity is convergent and after which it is divergent. Our study is complementary to the one reported in [E. A. Leicht, P. Holme, and M. E. J. Newman, Phys. Rev. E 73, 026120 (2006)], and is relevant to the missing link prediction problem.

Investigation of psychophysical similarity measures for selection of similar images in the diagnosis of clustered microcalcifications on mammograms

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Muramatsu, Chisako; Li Qiang; Schmidt, Robert; Shiraishi, Junji; Doi, Kunio

2008-01-01

The presentation of images with lesions of known pathology that are similar to an unknown lesion may be helpful to radiologists in the diagnosis of challenging cases for improving the diagnostic accuracy and also for reducing variation among different radiologists. The authors have been developing a computerized scheme for automatically selecting similar images with clustered microcalcifications on mammograms from a large database. For similar images to be useful, they must be similar from the point of view of the diagnosing radiologists. In order to select such images, subjective similarity ratings were obtained for a number of pairs of clustered microcalcifications by breast radiologists for establishment of a ''gold standard'' of image similarity, and the gold standard was employed for determination and evaluation of the selection of similar images. The images used in this study were obtained from the Digital Database for Screening Mammography developed by the University of South Florida. The subjective similarity ratings for 300 pairs of images with clustered microcalcifications were determined by ten breast radiologists. The authors determined a number of image features which represent the characteristics of clustered microcalcifications that radiologists would use in their diagnosis. For determination of objective similarity measures, an artificial neural network (ANN) was employed. The ANN was trained with the average subjective similarity ratings as teacher and selected image features as input data. The ANN was trained to learn the relationship between the image features and the radiologists' similarity ratings; therefore, once the training was completed, the ANN was able to determine the similarity, called a psychophysical similarity measure, which was expected to be close to radiologists' impressions, for an unknown pair of clustered microcalcifications. By use of a leave-one-out test method, the best combination of features was selected. The correlation

Investigation of psychophysical similarity measures for selection of similar images in the diagnosis of clustered microcalcifications on mammograms

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Muramatsu, Chisako; Li Qiang; Schmidt, Robert; Shiraishi, Junji; Doi, Kunio [Department of Radiology, University of Chicago, 5841 South Maryland Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637 (United States) and Department of Intelligent Image Information, Gifu University, 1-1 Yanagido, Gifu (Japan); Department of Radiology, Duke Advanced Imaging Labs, Duke University, 2424 Erwin Road, Suite 302, Durham, North Carolina 27705 (United States); Department of Radiology, University of Chicago, 5841 South Maryland Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637 (United States)

2008-12-15

The presentation of images with lesions of known pathology that are similar to an unknown lesion may be helpful to radiologists in the diagnosis of challenging cases for improving the diagnostic accuracy and also for reducing variation among different radiologists. The authors have been developing a computerized scheme for automatically selecting similar images with clustered microcalcifications on mammograms from a large database. For similar images to be useful, they must be similar from the point of view of the diagnosing radiologists. In order to select such images, subjective similarity ratings were obtained for a number of pairs of clustered microcalcifications by breast radiologists for establishment of a ''gold standard'' of image similarity, and the gold standard was employed for determination and evaluation of the selection of similar images. The images used in this study were obtained from the Digital Database for Screening Mammography developed by the University of South Florida. The subjective similarity ratings for 300 pairs of images with clustered microcalcifications were determined by ten breast radiologists. The authors determined a number of image features which represent the characteristics of clustered microcalcifications that radiologists would use in their diagnosis. For determination of objective similarity measures, an artificial neural network (ANN) was employed. The ANN was trained with the average subjective similarity ratings as teacher and selected image features as input data. The ANN was trained to learn the relationship between the image features and the radiologists' similarity ratings; therefore, once the training was completed, the ANN was able to determine the similarity, called a psychophysical similarity measure, which was expected to be close to radiologists' impressions, for an unknown pair of clustered microcalcifications. By use of a leave-one-out test method, the best combination of features

Self-Similarity of Jet Production in pp and p{/bar p} Collisions at RHIC, Tevatron and LHC

Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

Tokarev, M. V.; Dedovich, T. G.; Zborovský, Imrich

2012-01-01

Roč. 27, č. 21 (2012), s. 815-820 ISSN 0217-751X R&D Projects: GA MŠk LA08002; GA MŠk LA08015 Institutional support: RVO:61389005 Keywords : jets * self-similarity * high energy * scaling Subject RIV: BE - Theoretical Physics Impact factor: 1.127, year: 2012

Similar speaker recognition using nonlinear analysis

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Seo, J.P.; Kim, M.S.; Baek, I.C.; Kwon, Y.H.; Lee, K.S.; Chang, S.W.; Yang, S.I.

2004-01-01

Speech features of the conventional speaker identification system, are usually obtained by linear methods in spectral space. However, these methods have the drawback that speakers with similar voices cannot be distinguished, because the characteristics of their voices are also similar in spectral space. To overcome the difficulty in linear methods, we propose to use the correlation exponent in the nonlinear space as a new feature vector for speaker identification among persons with similar voices. We show that our proposed method surprisingly reduces the error rate of speaker identification system to speakers with similar voices

Similarity and self-similarity in high energy density physics: application to laboratory astrophysics

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Falize, E.

2008-10-01

The spectacular recent development of powerful facilities allows the astrophysical community to explore, in laboratory, astrophysical phenomena where radiation and matter are strongly coupled. The titles of the nine chapters of the thesis are: from high energy density physics to laboratory astrophysics; Lie groups, invariance and self-similarity; scaling laws and similarity properties in High-Energy-Density physics; the Burgan-Feix-Munier transformation; dynamics of polytropic gases; stationary radiating shocks and the POLAR project; structure, dynamics and stability of optically thin fluids; from young star jets to laboratory jets; modelling and experiences for laboratory jets

Taxation in Cesee Countries – Similarities and Differences

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Comaniciu Carmen

2015-12-01

Full Text Available The characteristics of fiscal revenues are the ones that demonstrate their importance for the formation of public financial resources, being considered as a product of historical development of the state. Numerous studies and researches on the taxes action in financial, economic and social level emphasized the link between fiscal policy, growth and level of development of a country. In this context, through this article, by presenting some general coordinates of taxation in countries of Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe (CESEE countries we will identify the similarities and differences concerning the taxation system and the impact of taxation on the socio-economic development. Without claiming an exhaustive approach, we consider that issues outlined highlight in which country taxation is a stimulating factor for economic growth and development, so that good practice be elements worthy of consideration.

Dynamic similarity in erosional processes

Science.gov (United States)

Scheidegger, A.E.

1963-01-01

A study is made of the dynamic similarity conditions obtaining in a variety of erosional processes. The pertinent equations for each type of process are written in dimensionless form; the similarity conditions can then easily be deduced. The processes treated are: raindrop action, slope evolution and river erosion. ?? 1963 Istituto Geofisico Italiano.

Personalized mortality prediction driven by electronic medical data and a patient similarity metric.

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Joon; Maslove, David M; Dubin, Joel A

2015-01-01

Clinical outcome prediction normally employs static, one-size-fits-all models that perform well for the average patient but are sub-optimal for individual patients with unique characteristics. In the era of digital healthcare, it is feasible to dynamically personalize decision support by identifying and analyzing similar past patients, in a way that is analogous to personalized product recommendation in e-commerce. Our objectives were: 1) to prove that analyzing only similar patients leads to better outcome prediction performance than analyzing all available patients, and 2) to characterize the trade-off between training data size and the degree of similarity between the training data and the index patient for whom prediction is to be made. We deployed a cosine-similarity-based patient similarity metric (PSM) to an intensive care unit (ICU) database to identify patients that are most similar to each patient and subsequently to custom-build 30-day mortality prediction models. Rich clinical and administrative data from the first day in the ICU from 17,152 adult ICU admissions were analyzed. The results confirmed that using data from only a small subset of most similar patients for training improves predictive performance in comparison with using data from all available patients. The results also showed that when too few similar patients are used for training, predictive performance degrades due to the effects of small sample sizes. Our PSM-based approach outperformed well-known ICU severity of illness scores. Although the improved prediction performance is achieved at the cost of increased computational burden, Big Data technologies can help realize personalized data-driven decision support at the point of care. The present study provides crucial empirical evidence for the promising potential of personalized data-driven decision support systems. With the increasing adoption of electronic medical record (EMR) systems, our novel medical data analytics contributes to

Personalized mortality prediction driven by electronic medical data and a patient similarity metric.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Joon Lee

Full Text Available Clinical outcome prediction normally employs static, one-size-fits-all models that perform well for the average patient but are sub-optimal for individual patients with unique characteristics. In the era of digital healthcare, it is feasible to dynamically personalize decision support by identifying and analyzing similar past patients, in a way that is analogous to personalized product recommendation in e-commerce. Our objectives were: 1 to prove that analyzing only similar patients leads to better outcome prediction performance than analyzing all available patients, and 2 to characterize the trade-off between training data size and the degree of similarity between the training data and the index patient for whom prediction is to be made.We deployed a cosine-similarity-based patient similarity metric (PSM to an intensive care unit (ICU database to identify patients that are most similar to each patient and subsequently to custom-build 30-day mortality prediction models. Rich clinical and administrative data from the first day in the ICU from 17,152 adult ICU admissions were analyzed. The results confirmed that using data from only a small subset of most similar patients for training improves predictive performance in comparison with using data from all available patients. The results also showed that when too few similar patients are used for training, predictive performance degrades due to the effects of small sample sizes. Our PSM-based approach outperformed well-known ICU severity of illness scores. Although the improved prediction performance is achieved at the cost of increased computational burden, Big Data technologies can help realize personalized data-driven decision support at the point of care.The present study provides crucial empirical evidence for the promising potential of personalized data-driven decision support systems. With the increasing adoption of electronic medical record (EMR systems, our novel medical data analytics

Microbiota epitope similarity either dampens or enhances the immunogenicity of disease-associated antigenic epitopes.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sebastian Carrasco Pro

Full Text Available The microbiome influences adaptive immunity and molecular mimicry influences T cell reactivity. Here, we evaluated whether the sequence similarity of various antigens to the microbiota dampens or increases immunogenicity of T cell epitopes. Sets of epitopes and control sequences derived from 38 antigenic categories (infectious pathogens, allergens, autoantigens were retrieved from the Immune Epitope Database (IEDB. Their similarity to microbiome sequences was calculated using the BLOSUM62 matrix. We found that sequence similarity was associated with either dampened (tolerogenic; e.g. most allergens or increased (inflammatory; e.g. Dengue and West Nile viruses likelihood of a peptide being immunogenic as a function of epitope source category. Ten-fold cross-validation and validation using sets of manually curated epitopes and non-epitopes derived from allergens were used to confirm these initial observations. Furthermore, the genus from which the microbiome homologous sequences were derived influenced whether a tolerogenic versus inflammatory modulatory effect was observed, with Fusobacterium most associated with inflammatory influences and Bacteroides most associated with tolerogenic influences. We validated these effects using PBMCs stimulated with various sets of microbiome peptides. "Tolerogenic" microbiome peptides elicited IL-10 production, "inflammatory" peptides elicited mixed IL-10/IFNγ production, while microbiome epitopes homologous to self were completely unreactive for both cytokines. We also tested the sequence similarity of cockroach epitopes to specific microbiome sequences derived from households of cockroach allergic individuals and non-allergic controls. Microbiomes from cockroach allergic households were less likely to contain sequences homologous to previously defined cockroach allergens. These results are compatible with the hypothesis that microbiome sequences may contribute to the tolerization of T cells for allergen

Trajectory similarity join in spatial networks

KAUST Repository

Shang, Shuo

2017-09-07

The matching of similar pairs of objects, called similarity join, is fundamental functionality in data management. We consider the case of trajectory similarity join (TS-Join), where the objects are trajectories of vehicles moving in road networks. Thus, given two sets of trajectories and a threshold θ, the TS-Join returns all pairs of trajectories from the two sets with similarity above θ. This join targets applications such as trajectory near-duplicate detection, data cleaning, ridesharing recommendation, and traffic congestion prediction. With these applications in mind, we provide a purposeful definition of similarity. To enable efficient TS-Join processing on large sets of trajectories, we develop search space pruning techniques and take into account the parallel processing capabilities of modern processors. Specifically, we present a two-phase divide-and-conquer algorithm. For each trajectory, the algorithm first finds similar trajectories. Then it merges the results to achieve a final result. The algorithm exploits an upper bound on the spatiotemporal similarity and a heuristic scheduling strategy for search space pruning. The algorithm\\'s per-trajectory searches are independent of each other and can be performed in parallel, and the merging has constant cost. An empirical study with real data offers insight in the performance of the algorithm and demonstrates that is capable of outperforming a well-designed baseline algorithm by an order of magnitude.

BSSF: a fingerprint based ultrafast binding site similarity search and function analysis server

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jiang Hualiang

2010-01-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Genome sequencing and post-genomics projects such as structural genomics are extending the frontier of the study of sequence-structure-function relationship of genes and their products. Although many sequence/structure-based methods have been devised with the aim of deciphering this delicate relationship, there still remain large gaps in this fundamental problem, which continuously drives researchers to develop novel methods to extract relevant information from sequences and structures and to infer the functions of newly identified genes by genomics technology. Results Here we present an ultrafast method, named BSSF(Binding Site Similarity & Function, which enables researchers to conduct similarity searches in a comprehensive three-dimensional binding site database extracted from PDB structures. This method utilizes a fingerprint representation of the binding site and a validated statistical Z-score function scheme to judge the similarity between the query and database items, even if their similarities are only constrained in a sub-pocket. This fingerprint based similarity measurement was also validated on a known binding site dataset by comparing with geometric hashing, which is a standard 3D similarity method. The comparison clearly demonstrated the utility of this ultrafast method. After conducting the database searching, the hit list is further analyzed to provide basic statistical information about the occurrences of Gene Ontology terms and Enzyme Commission numbers, which may benefit researchers by helping them to design further experiments to study the query proteins. Conclusions This ultrafast web-based system will not only help researchers interested in drug design and structural genomics to identify similar binding sites, but also assist them by providing further analysis of hit list from database searching.

On self-similar Tolman models

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Maharaj, S.D.

1988-01-01

The self-similar spherically symmetric solutions of the Einstein field equation for the case of dust are identified. These form a subclass of the Tolman models. These self-similar models contain the solution recently presented by Chi [J. Math. Phys. 28, 1539 (1987)], thereby refuting the claim of having found a new solution to the Einstein field equations

Integrated Graduate and Continuing Education in Protein Chromatography for Bioprocess Development and Scale-Up

Science.gov (United States)

Carta, Jungbauer

2011-01-01

We describe an intensive course that integrates graduate and continuing education focused on the development and scale-up of chromatography processes used for the recovery and purification of proteins with special emphasis on biotherapeutics. The course includes lectures, laboratories, teamwork, and a design exercise and offers a complete view of…

Phonological similarity and orthographic similarity affect probed serial recall of Chinese characters.

Science.gov (United States)

Lin, Yi-Chen; Chen, Hsiang-Yu; Lai, Yvonne C; Wu, Denise H

2015-04-01

The previous literature on working memory (WM) has indicated that verbal materials are dominantly retained in phonological representations, whereas other linguistic information (e.g., orthography, semantics) only contributes to verbal WM minimally, if not negligibly. Although accumulating evidence has suggested that multiple linguistic components jointly support verbal WM, the visual/orthographic contribution has rarely been addressed in alphabetic languages, possibly due to the difficulty of dissociating the effects of word forms from the effects of their pronunciations in relatively shallow orthography. In the present study, we examined whether the orthographic representations of Chinese characters support the retention of verbal materials in this language of deep orthography. In Experiments 1a and 2, we independently manipulated the phonological and orthographic similarity of horizontal and vertical characters, respectively, and found that participants' accuracy of probed serial recall was reduced by both similar pronunciations and shared phonetic radicals in the to-be-remembered stimuli. Moreover, Experiment 1b showed that only the effect of phonological, but not that of orthographic, similarity was affected by concurrent articulatory suppression. Taken together, the present results indicate the indispensable contribution of orthographic representations to verbal WM of Chinese characters, and suggest that the linguistic characteristics of a specific language not only determine long-term linguistic-processing mechanisms, but also delineate the organization of verbal WM for that language.

Notions of similarity for systems biology models.

Science.gov (United States)

Henkel, Ron; Hoehndorf, Robert; Kacprowski, Tim; Knüpfer, Christian; Liebermeister, Wolfram; Waltemath, Dagmar

2018-01-01

Systems biology models are rapidly increasing in complexity, size and numbers. When building large models, researchers rely on software tools for the retrieval, comparison, combination and merging of models, as well as for version control. These tools need to be able to quantify the differences and similarities between computational models. However, depending on the specific application, the notion of 'similarity' may greatly vary. A general notion of model similarity, applicable to various types of models, is still missing. Here we survey existing methods for the comparison of models, introduce quantitative measures for model similarity, and discuss potential applications of combined similarity measures. To frame model comparison as a general problem, we describe a theoretical approach to defining and computing similarities based on a combination of different model aspects. The six aspects that we define as potentially relevant for similarity are underlying encoding, references to biological entities, quantitative behaviour, qualitative behaviour, mathematical equations and parameters and network structure. We argue that future similarity measures will benefit from combining these model aspects in flexible, problem-specific ways to mimic users' intuition about model similarity, and to support complex model searches in databases. © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press.

Similarity measures for face recognition

CERN Document Server

Vezzetti, Enrico

2015-01-01

Face recognition has several applications, including security, such as (authentication and identification of device users and criminal suspects), and in medicine (corrective surgery and diagnosis). Facial recognition programs rely on algorithms that can compare and compute the similarity between two sets of images. This eBook explains some of the similarity measures used in facial recognition systems in a single volume. Readers will learn about various measures including Minkowski distances, Mahalanobis distances, Hansdorff distances, cosine-based distances, among other methods. The book also summarizes errors that may occur in face recognition methods. Computer scientists "facing face" and looking to select and test different methods of computing similarities will benefit from this book. The book is also useful tool for students undertaking computer vision courses.

Phylogenetic similarity of the canine parvovirus wild-type isolates on the basis of VP1/VP2 gene fragment sequence analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Rypul, K; Chmielewski, R; Smielewska-Loś, E; Klimentowski, S

2002-04-01

Biological material was taken from dogs with diarrhoea. Faecal samples were taken from within live animals and intestinal tract fragments (i.e. small intestine, and stomach) were taken from dead animals. In total, 18 specimens were investigated from dogs housed alone or in large groups. To test for the presence of the virus, latex (On Site Biotech, Uppsala, Sweden) and direct immunofluorescence tests were performed. At the same time, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with primers complementary to a conservative region of VP1/VP2 was carried out. The products of amplification were analysed on 2% agarose gel. The purified products were cloned with the Template Generation System (Finnzymes, Espoo, Finland) using a transposition reaction and positive clones were searched using the 'colony screening by PCR' method. The sequencing gave 12 sequences of VP1/VP2 gene fragments that were of high similarity. Among the 12 analysed sequences, six exhibited 88% similarity, four exhibited 100% similarity and two exhibited 71% similarity.

Surf similarity and solitary wave runup

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Fuhrman, David R.; Madsen, Per A.

2008-01-01

The notion of surf similarity in the runup of solitary waves is revisited. We show that the surf similarity parameter for solitary waves may be effectively reduced to the beach slope divided by the offshore wave height to depth ratio. This clarifies its physical interpretation relative to a previ...... functional dependence on their respective surf similarity parameters. Important equivalencies in the runup of sinusoidal and solitary waves are thus revealed.......The notion of surf similarity in the runup of solitary waves is revisited. We show that the surf similarity parameter for solitary waves may be effectively reduced to the beach slope divided by the offshore wave height to depth ratio. This clarifies its physical interpretation relative...... to a previous parameterization, which was not given in an explicit form. Good coherency with experimental (breaking) runup data is preserved with this simpler parameter. A recasting of analytical (nonbreaking) runup expressions for sinusoidal and solitary waves additionally shows that they contain identical...

Product (RED)

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Ponte, Stefano

2011-01-01

) and the consumers who buy iconic brand products to help ‘distant others’. While in many other forms of causumerism, labels or certification systems ‘prove’ that a product is just, in RED, aid celebrities provide the proof. From the consumer point of view both labels and celebrities provide a similar simplification...... of complex social, economic, and environmental processes. At the same time, we argue that there are important distinctions as well—labels and certifications are ultimately about improving the conditions of production, whereas RED is about accepting existing production and trade systems and donating......(PRODUCT)RED™ (hereafter RED) is a cobranding initiative launched in 2006 by the aid celebrity Bono to raise money from product sales to support The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. In this paper we argue that RED is shifting the boundaries of ‘causumerism’ (shopping...

Prepubertal goat oocytes from large follicles result in similar blastocyst production and embryo ploidy than those from adult goats.

Science.gov (United States)

Romaguera, R; Moll, X; Morató, R; Roura, M; Palomo, M J; Catalá, M G; Jiménez-Macedo, A R; Hammami, S; Izquierdo, D; Mogas, T; Paramio, M T

2011-07-01

Developmental competence of oocytes from prepubertal females is lower than those from adult females. Oocyte development competence is positively related to follicular diameter. Most of the follicles of prepubertal goat ovaries are smaller than 3 mm. The aim of this study was to compare oocytes of two follicle sizes (goats with oocytes from adult goats in relation to their in vitro production and quality of blastocysts. Oocytes from prepubertal goats were obtained from slaughterhouse ovaries and selected according to the follicle diameter whereas oocytes from adult goats were recovered in vivo by LOPU technique without prior selection of follicle size. COCs were IVM for 27 h, IVF at the conventional conditions with fresh semen and presumptive zygotes were cultured in SOF medium for 8 days. Blastocysts obtained were vitrified and after warming their blastocoele re-expansion and the ploidy by FISH technique were assessed. We found significant differences between blastocysts yield of oocytes recovered from follicles smaller than 3 mm of prepubertal goats compared to those from adult goats (5.45% vs 20. 83%, respectively) however, these differences disappear if oocytes were recovered form large follicles (18.07%). A total of 28 blastocysts were analysed and 96.43% showed mixoploidy. Age did not affect the number of embryos with abnormal ploidy or blastocyst re-expansion after warming. Furthermore, the percentage of diploid blastomeres per embryo was similar in the 3 groups studied, adult, prepubertal from follicles ≥ 3 mm and goats 45 days old were not different to the blastocysts produced from adult goats, both in terms of quantity and quality. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Similarities and differences in vapor explosion criteria

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Cronenberg, A.W.

1978-01-01

An overview of recent ideas pertaining to vapor explosion criteria indicates that in general sense, a consensus of opinion is emerging on the conditions applicable to explosive vaporization. Experimental and theoretical work has lead a number of investigators to the formulation of such conditions which are quite similar in many respects, although the quantitative details of the model formulation of such conditions are somewhat different. All model concepts are consistent in that an initial period of stable film boiling, separating molten fuel from coolant, is considered necessary (at least for large-scale interactions and efficient intermixing), with subsequent breakdown of film boiling due to pressure and/or thermal effects, followed by intimate fuel-coolant contact and a rapid vaporization process which is sufficient to cause shock pressurization. Although differences arise as to the conditions for and the energetics associated with film boiling destabilization and the mode and energetics of fragmentation and intermixing. However, the principal area of difference seems to be the question of what constitutes the requisite condition(s) for rapid vapor production to cause shock pressurization

Identifying mechanistic similarities in drug responses

KAUST Repository

Zhao, C.

2012-05-15

Motivation: In early drug development, it would be beneficial to be able to identify those dynamic patterns of gene response that indicate that drugs targeting a particular gene will be likely or not to elicit the desired response. One approach would be to quantitate the degree of similarity between the responses that cells show when exposed to drugs, so that consistencies in the regulation of cellular response processes that produce success or failure can be more readily identified.Results: We track drug response using fluorescent proteins as transcription activity reporters. Our basic assumption is that drugs inducing very similar alteration in transcriptional regulation will produce similar temporal trajectories on many of the reporter proteins and hence be identified as having similarities in their mechanisms of action (MOA). The main body of this work is devoted to characterizing similarity in temporal trajectories/signals. To do so, we must first identify the key points that determine mechanistic similarity between two drug responses. Directly comparing points on the two signals is unrealistic, as it cannot handle delays and speed variations on the time axis. Hence, to capture the similarities between reporter responses, we develop an alignment algorithm that is robust to noise, time delays and is able to find all the contiguous parts of signals centered about a core alignment (reflecting a core mechanism in drug response). Applying the proposed algorithm to a range of real drug experiments shows that the result agrees well with the prior drug MOA knowledge. © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

Bacterial Cellulose Production from Industrial Waste and by-Product Streams.

Science.gov (United States)

Tsouko, Erminda; Kourmentza, Constantina; Ladakis, Dimitrios; Kopsahelis, Nikolaos; Mandala, Ioanna; Papanikolaou, Seraphim; Paloukis, Fotis; Alves, Vitor; Koutinas, Apostolis

2015-07-01

The utilization of fermentation media derived from waste and by-product streams from biodiesel and confectionery industries could lead to highly efficient production of bacterial cellulose. Batch fermentations with the bacterial strain Komagataeibacter sucrofermentans DSM (Deutsche Sammlung von Mikroorganismen) 15973 were initially carried out in synthetic media using commercial sugars and crude glycerol. The highest bacterial cellulose concentration was achieved when crude glycerol (3.2 g/L) and commercial sucrose (4.9 g/L) were used. The combination of crude glycerol and sunflower meal hydrolysates as the sole fermentation media resulted in bacterial cellulose production of 13.3 g/L. Similar results (13 g/L) were obtained when flour-rich hydrolysates produced from confectionery industry waste streams were used. The properties of bacterial celluloses developed when different fermentation media were used showed water holding capacities of 102-138 g · water/g · dry bacterial cellulose, viscosities of 4.7-9.3 dL/g, degree of polymerization of 1889.1-2672.8, stress at break of 72.3-139.5 MPa and Young's modulus of 0.97-1.64 GPa. This study demonstrated that by-product streams from the biodiesel industry and waste streams from confectionery industries could be used as the sole sources of nutrients for the production of bacterial cellulose with similar properties as those produced with commercial sources of nutrients.

Similarity indices I: what do they measure

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Johnston, J.W.

1976-11-01

A method for estimating the effects of environmental effusions on ecosystems is described. The characteristics of 25 similarity indices used in studies of ecological communities were investigated. The type of data structure, to which these indices are frequently applied, was described as consisting of vectors of measurements on attributes (species) observed in a set of samples. A general similarity index was characterized as the result of a two-step process defined on a pair of vectors. In the first step an attribute similarity score is obtained for each attribute by comparing the attribute values observed in the pair of vectors. The result is a vector of attribute similarity scores. These are combined in the second step to arrive at the similarity index. The operation in the first step was characterized as a function, g, defined on pairs of attribute values. The second operation was characterized as a function, F, defined on the vector of attribute similarity scores from the first step. Usually, F was a simple sum or weighted sum of the attribute similarity scores. It is concluded that similarity indices should not be used as the test statistic to discriminate between two ecological communities

Similarity indices I: what do they measure.

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Johnston, J.W.

1976-11-01

A method for estimating the effects of environmental effusions on ecosystems is described. The characteristics of 25 similarity indices used in studies of ecological communities were investigated. The type of data structure, to which these indices are frequently applied, was described as consisting of vectors of measurements on attributes (species) observed in a set of samples. A general similarity index was characterized as the result of a two-step process defined on a pair of vectors. In the first step an attribute similarity score is obtained for each attribute by comparing the attribute values observed in the pair of vectors. The result is a vector of attribute similarity scores. These are combined in the second step to arrive at the similarity index. The operation in the first step was characterized as a function, g, defined on pairs of attribute values. The second operation was characterized as a function, F, defined on the vector of attribute similarity scores from the first step. Usually, F was a simple sum or weighted sum of the attribute similarity scores. It is concluded that similarity indices should not be used as the test statistic to discriminate between two ecological communities.

Similarity in Bilateral Isolated Internal Orbital Fractures.

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Hung-Chang; Cox, Jacob T; Sanyal, Abanti; Mahoney, Nicholas R

2018-04-13

In evaluating patients sustaining bilateral isolated internal orbital fractures, the authors have observed both similar fracture locations and also similar expansion of orbital volumes. In this study, we aim to investigate if there is a propensity for the 2 orbits to fracture in symmetrically similar patterns when sustaining similar trauma. A retrospective chart review was performed studying all cases at our institution of bilateral isolated internal orbital fractures involving the medial wall and/or the floor at the time of presentation. The similarity of the bilateral fracture locations was evaluated using the Fisher's exact test. The bilateral expanded orbital volumes were analyzed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test to assess for orbital volume similarity. Twenty-four patients with bilateral internal orbital fractures were analyzed for fracture location similarity. Seventeen patients (70.8%) had 100% concordance in the orbital subregion fractured, and the association between the right and the left orbital fracture subregion locations was statistically significant (P < 0.0001). Fifteen patients were analyzed for orbital volume similarity. The average orbital cavity volume was 31.2 ± 3.8 cm on the right and 32.0 ± 3.7 cm on the left. There was a statistically significant difference between right and left orbital cavity volumes (P = 0.0026). The data from this study suggest that an individual who suffers isolated bilateral internal orbital fractures has a statistically significant similarity in the location of their orbital fractures. However, there does not appear to be statistically significant similarity in the expansion of the orbital volumes in these patients.

Personality similarity and life satisfaction in couples

OpenAIRE

Furler Katrin; Gomez Veronica; Grob Alexander

2013-01-01

The present study examined the association between personality similarity and life satisfaction in a large nationally representative sample of 1608 romantic couples. Similarity effects were computed for the Big Five personality traits as well as for personality profiles with global and differentiated indices of similarity. Results showed substantial actor and partner effects indicating that both partners' personality traits were related to both partners' life satisfaction. Personality similar...

Δ(1232) production by virtual photons

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Wacker, K.; Drews, G.; Knobloch, J.; Nagel, H.; Rabe, E.; Schlatter, W.D.; Spitzer, H.

1978-07-01

The reaction γsub(v)p → pπ + π - was studied in the W, Q 2 region 1.3 to 2.8 GeV, 0.3 to 1.4 GeV 2 using the streamer chamber at DESY. An analysis of Δ ++ (1232) and Δ 0 (1232) production via γsub(v)p → Δπ is presented. The W dependence, production angular distribution and decay distribution of Δ ++ in the channel Δ ++ π - is similar to that found in photoproduction. At small momentum transfers the Q 2 dependence of Δ ++ production follows that of the rho propagator as predicted by VDM; at large momentum transfer there is little Q 2 dependence. The W dependence of Δ 0 production and its ratio with respect to Δ ++ production is similar to that found in photoproduction. (orig.) [de

Similarity analysis between chromosomes of Homo sapiens and monkeys with correlation coefficient, rank correlation coefficient and cosine similarity measures.

Science.gov (United States)

Someswara Rao, Chinta; Viswanadha Raju, S

2016-03-01

In this paper, we consider correlation coefficient, rank correlation coefficient and cosine similarity measures for evaluating similarity between Homo sapiens and monkeys. We used DNA chromosomes of genome wide genes to determine the correlation between the chromosomal content and evolutionary relationship. The similarity among the H. sapiens and monkeys is measured for a total of 210 chromosomes related to 10 species. The similarity measures of these different species show the relationship between the H. sapiens and monkey. This similarity will be helpful at theft identification, maternity identification, disease identification, etc.

Similarity-based pattern analysis and recognition

CERN Document Server

Pelillo, Marcello

2013-01-01

This accessible text/reference presents a coherent overview of the emerging field of non-Euclidean similarity learning. The book presents a broad range of perspectives on similarity-based pattern analysis and recognition methods, from purely theoretical challenges to practical, real-world applications. The coverage includes both supervised and unsupervised learning paradigms, as well as generative and discriminative models. Topics and features: explores the origination and causes of non-Euclidean (dis)similarity measures, and how they influence the performance of traditional classification alg

Effects of similar intakes of marine n-3 fatty acids from enriched food products and fish oil on cardiovascular risk markers in healthy human subjects.

Science.gov (United States)

Kirkhus, Bente; Lamglait, Amandine; Eilertsen, Karl-Erik; Falch, Eva; Haider, Trond; Vik, Hogne; Hoem, Nils; Hagve, Tor-Arne; Basu, Samar; Olsen, Elisabeth; Seljeflot, Ingebjørg; Nyberg, Lena; Elind, Elisabeth; Ulven, Stine M

2012-05-01

There is convincing evidence that consumption of fish and fish oil rich in long-chain (LC) n-3 PUFA (n-3 LCPUFA), EPA (20 : 5n-3) and DHA (22 : 6n-3) reduce the risk of CHD. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether n-3 LCPUFA-enriched food products provide similar beneficial effects as fish oil with regard to incorporation into plasma lipids and effects on cardiovascular risk markers. A parallel 7-week intervention trial was performed where 159 healthy men and women were randomised to consume either 34 g fish pâté (n 44), 500 ml fruit juice (n 38) or three capsules of concentrated fish oil (n 40), all contributing to a daily intake of approximately 1 g EPA and DHA. A fourth group did not receive any supplementation or food product and served as controls (n 37). Plasma fatty acid composition, serum lipids, and markers of inflammation and oxidative stress were measured. Compared with the control group, plasma n-3 LCPUFA and EPA:arachidonic acid ratio increased equally in all intervention groups. However, no significant changes in blood lipids and markers of inflammation and oxidative stress were observed. In conclusion, enriched fish pâté and fruit juice represent suitable delivery systems for n-3 LCPUFA. However, although the dose given is known to reduce the risk of CVD, no significant changes were observed on cardiovascular risk markers in this healthy population.

Product Platform Performance

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Munk, Lone

The aim of this research is to improve understanding of platform-based product development by studying platform performance in relation to internal effects in companies. Platform-based product development makes it possible to deliver product variety and at the same time reduce the needed resources...... engaging in platform-based product development. Similarly platform assessment criteria lack empirical verification regarding relevance and sufficiency. The thesis focuses on • the process of identifying and estimating internal effects, • verification of performance of product platforms, (i...... experienced representatives from the different life systems phase systems of the platform products. The effects are estimated and modeled within different scenarios, taking into account financial and real option aspects. The model illustrates and supports estimation and quantification of internal platform...

Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Based on Trust Model with Fused Similar Factor

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ye Li

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Recommended system is beneficial to e-commerce sites, which provides customers with product information and recommendations; the recommendation system is currently widely used in many fields. In an era of information explosion, the key challenges of the recommender system is to obtain valid information from the tremendous amount of information and produce high quality recommendations. However, when facing the large mount of information, the traditional collaborative filtering algorithm usually obtains a high degree of sparseness, which ultimately lead to low accuracy recommendations. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel algorithm named Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Based on Trust Model with Fused Similar Factor, which is based on the trust model and is combined with the user similarity. The novel algorithm takes into account the degree of interest overlap between the two users and results in a superior performance to the recommendation based on Trust Model in criteria of Precision, Recall, Diversity and Coverage. Additionally, the proposed model can effectively improve the efficiency of collaborative filtering algorithm and achieve high performance.

Large margin classification with indefinite similarities

KAUST Repository

Alabdulmohsin, Ibrahim; Cisse, Moustapha; Gao, Xin; Zhang, Xiangliang

2016-01-01

Classification with indefinite similarities has attracted attention in the machine learning community. This is partly due to the fact that many similarity functions that arise in practice are not symmetric positive semidefinite, i.e. the Mercer

Engaging narratives evoke similar neural activity and lead to similar time perception.

Science.gov (United States)

Cohen, Samantha S; Henin, Simon; Parra, Lucas C

2017-07-04

It is said that we lose track of time - that "time flies" - when we are engrossed in a story. How does engagement with the story cause this distorted perception of time, and what are its neural correlates? People commit both time and attentional resources to an engaging stimulus. For narrative videos, attentional engagement can be represented as the level of similarity between the electroencephalographic responses of different viewers. Here we show that this measure of neural engagement predicted the duration of time that viewers were willing to commit to narrative videos. Contrary to popular wisdom, engagement did not distort the average perception of time duration. Rather, more similar brain responses resulted in a more uniform perception of time across viewers. These findings suggest that by capturing the attention of an audience, narrative videos bring both neural processing and the subjective perception of time into synchrony.

Notions of similarity for computational biology models

KAUST Repository

Waltemath, Dagmar

2016-03-21

Computational models used in biology are rapidly increasing in complexity, size, and numbers. To build such large models, researchers need to rely on software tools for model retrieval, model combination, and version control. These tools need to be able to quantify the differences and similarities between computational models. However, depending on the specific application, the notion of similarity may greatly vary. A general notion of model similarity, applicable to various types of models, is still missing. Here, we introduce a general notion of quantitative model similarities, survey the use of existing model comparison methods in model building and management, and discuss potential applications of model comparison. To frame model comparison as a general problem, we describe a theoretical approach to defining and computing similarities based on different model aspects. Potentially relevant aspects of a model comprise its references to biological entities, network structure, mathematical equations and parameters, and dynamic behaviour. Future similarity measures could combine these model aspects in flexible, problem-specific ways in order to mimic users\\' intuition about model similarity, and to support complex model searches in databases.

Self-similarity in incompressible Navier-Stokes equations.

Science.gov (United States)

Ercan, Ali; Kavvas, M Levent

2015-12-01

The self-similarity conditions of the 3-dimensional (3D) incompressible Navier-Stokes equations are obtained by utilizing one-parameter Lie group of point scaling transformations. It is found that the scaling exponents of length dimensions in i = 1, 2, 3 coordinates in 3-dimensions are not arbitrary but equal for the self-similarity of 3D incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. It is also shown that the self-similarity in this particular flow process can be achieved in different time and space scales when the viscosity of the fluid is also scaled in addition to other flow variables. In other words, the self-similarity of Navier-Stokes equations is achievable under different fluid environments in the same or different gravity conditions. Self-similarity criteria due to initial and boundary conditions are also presented. Utilizing the proposed self-similarity conditions of the 3D hydrodynamic flow process, the value of a flow variable at a specified time and space can be scaled to a corresponding value in a self-similar domain at the corresponding time and space.

Notions of similarity for computational biology models

KAUST Repository

Waltemath, Dagmar; Henkel, Ron; Hoehndorf, Robert; Kacprowski, Tim; Knuepfer, Christian; Liebermeister, Wolfram

2016-01-01

Computational models used in biology are rapidly increasing in complexity, size, and numbers. To build such large models, researchers need to rely on software tools for model retrieval, model combination, and version control. These tools need to be able to quantify the differences and similarities between computational models. However, depending on the specific application, the notion of similarity may greatly vary. A general notion of model similarity, applicable to various types of models, is still missing. Here, we introduce a general notion of quantitative model similarities, survey the use of existing model comparison methods in model building and management, and discuss potential applications of model comparison. To frame model comparison as a general problem, we describe a theoretical approach to defining and computing similarities based on different model aspects. Potentially relevant aspects of a model comprise its references to biological entities, network structure, mathematical equations and parameters, and dynamic behaviour. Future similarity measures could combine these model aspects in flexible, problem-specific ways in order to mimic users' intuition about model similarity, and to support complex model searches in databases.

Personalized Mortality Prediction Driven by Electronic Medical Data and a Patient Similarity Metric

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Joon; Maslove, David M.; Dubin, Joel A.

2015-01-01

Background Clinical outcome prediction normally employs static, one-size-fits-all models that perform well for the average patient but are sub-optimal for individual patients with unique characteristics. In the era of digital healthcare, it is feasible to dynamically personalize decision support by identifying and analyzing similar past patients, in a way that is analogous to personalized product recommendation in e-commerce. Our objectives were: 1) to prove that analyzing only similar patients leads to better outcome prediction performance than analyzing all available patients, and 2) to characterize the trade-off between training data size and the degree of similarity between the training data and the index patient for whom prediction is to be made. Methods and Findings We deployed a cosine-similarity-based patient similarity metric (PSM) to an intensive care unit (ICU) database to identify patients that are most similar to each patient and subsequently to custom-build 30-day mortality prediction models. Rich clinical and administrative data from the first day in the ICU from 17,152 adult ICU admissions were analyzed. The results confirmed that using data from only a small subset of most similar patients for training improves predictive performance in comparison with using data from all available patients. The results also showed that when too few similar patients are used for training, predictive performance degrades due to the effects of small sample sizes. Our PSM-based approach outperformed well-known ICU severity of illness scores. Although the improved prediction performance is achieved at the cost of increased computational burden, Big Data technologies can help realize personalized data-driven decision support at the point of care. Conclusions The present study provides crucial empirical evidence for the promising potential of personalized data-driven decision support systems. With the increasing adoption of electronic medical record (EMR) systems, our

SpolSimilaritySearch - A web tool to compare and search similarities between spoligotypes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex.

Science.gov (United States)

Couvin, David; Zozio, Thierry; Rastogi, Nalin

2017-07-01

Spoligotyping is one of the most commonly used polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based methods for identification and study of genetic diversity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC). Despite its known limitations if used alone, the methodology is particularly useful when used in combination with other methods such as mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units - variable number of tandem DNA repeats (MIRU-VNTRs). At a worldwide scale, spoligotyping has allowed identification of information on 103,856 MTBC isolates (corresponding to 98049 clustered strains plus 5807 unique isolates from 169 countries of patient origin) contained within the SITVIT2 proprietary database of the Institut Pasteur de la Guadeloupe. The SpolSimilaritySearch web-tool described herein (available at: http://www.pasteur-guadeloupe.fr:8081/SpolSimilaritySearch) incorporates a similarity search algorithm allowing users to get a complete overview of similar spoligotype patterns (with information on presence or absence of 43 spacers) in the aforementioned worldwide database. This tool allows one to analyze spread and evolutionary patterns of MTBC by comparing similar spoligotype patterns, to distinguish between widespread, specific and/or confined patterns, as well as to pinpoint patterns with large deleted blocks, which play an intriguing role in the genetic epidemiology of M. tuberculosis. Finally, the SpolSimilaritySearch tool also provides with the country distribution patterns for each queried spoligotype. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Acrylamide in Fried Potato Products

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Luning, Pieternel; Sanny, Maimunah

2016-01-01

High acrylamide levels have been detected in fried potato products. Dietary intake studies observed large differences in acrylamide between single foodstuffs, within food categories, and within batches of similarly processed products. FAO/WHO emphasized that causes of variation need to be

7 CFR 51.632 - Similar varietal characteristics.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Similar varietal characteristics. 51.632 Section 51.632 Agriculture Regulations of the Department of Agriculture AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE (Standards..., and Arizona) Definitions § 51.632 Similar varietal characteristics. Similar varietal characteristics...

7 CFR 51.694 - Similar varietal characteristics.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Similar varietal characteristics. 51.694 Section 51.694 Agriculture Regulations of the Department of Agriculture AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE (Standards..., and Arizona) Definitions § 51.694 Similar varietal characteristics. Similar varietal characteristics...

Testing Self-Similarity Through Lamperti Transformations

KAUST Repository

Lee, Myoungji; Genton, Marc G.; Jun, Mikyoung

2016-01-01

extensively, while statistical tests for self-similarity are scarce and limited to processes indexed in one dimension. This paper proposes a statistical hypothesis test procedure for self-similarity of a stochastic process indexed in one dimension and multi

On self-similarity of crack layer

Science.gov (United States)

Botsis, J.; Kunin, B.

1987-01-01

The crack layer (CL) theory of Chudnovsky (1986), based on principles of thermodynamics of irreversible processes, employs a crucial hypothesis of self-similarity. The self-similarity hypothesis states that the value of the damage density at a point x of the active zone at a time t coincides with that at the corresponding point in the initial (t = 0) configuration of the active zone, the correspondence being given by a time-dependent affine transformation of the space variables. In this paper, the implications of the self-similarity hypothesis for qusi-static CL propagation is investigated using polystyrene as a model material and examining the evolution of damage distribution along the trailing edge which is approximated by a straight segment perpendicular to the crack path. The results support the self-similarity hypothesis adopted by the CL theory.

Discovering Music Structure via Similarity Fusion

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

for representing music structure is studied in a simplified scenario consisting of 4412 songs and two similarity measures among them. The results suggest that the PLSA model is a useful framework to combine different sources of information, and provides a reasonable space for song representation.......Automatic methods for music navigation and music recommendation exploit the structure in the music to carry out a meaningful exploration of the “song space”. To get a satisfactory performance from such systems, one should incorporate as much information about songs similarity as possible; however...... semantics”, in such a way that all observed similarities can be satisfactorily explained using the latent semantics. Therefore, one can think of these semantics as the real structure in music, in the sense that they can explain the observed similarities among songs. The suitability of the PLSA model...

Discovering Music Structure via Similarity Fusion

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Arenas-García, Jerónimo; Parrado-Hernandez, Emilio; Meng, Anders

Automatic methods for music navigation and music recommendation exploit the structure in the music to carry out a meaningful exploration of the “song space”. To get a satisfactory performance from such systems, one should incorporate as much information about songs similarity as possible; however...... semantics”, in such a way that all observed similarities can be satisfactorily explained using the latent semantics. Therefore, one can think of these semantics as the real structure in music, in the sense that they can explain the observed similarities among songs. The suitability of the PLSA model...... for representing music structure is studied in a simplified scenario consisting of 4412 songs and two similarity measures among them. The results suggest that the PLSA model is a useful framework to combine different sources of information, and provides a reasonable space for song representation....

Picocyanobacteria and deep-ocean fluorescent dissolved organic matter share similar optical properties

Science.gov (United States)

Zhao, Zhao; Gonsior, Michael; Luek, Jenna; Timko, Stephen; Ianiri, Hope; Hertkorn, Norbert; Schmitt-Kopplin, Philippe; Fang, Xiaoting; Zeng, Qinglu; Jiao, Nianzhi; Chen, Feng

2017-05-01

Marine chromophoric dissolved organic matter (CDOM) and its related fluorescent components (FDOM), which are widely distributed but highly photobleached in the surface ocean, are critical in regulating light attenuation in the ocean. However, the origins of marine FDOM are still under investigation. Here we show that cultured picocyanobacteria, Synechococcus and Prochlorococcus, release FDOM that closely match the typical fluorescent signals found in oceanic environments. Picocyanobacterial FDOM also shows comparable apparent fluorescent quantum yields and undergoes similar photo-degradation behaviour when compared with deep-ocean FDOM, further strengthening the similarity between them. Ultrahigh-resolution mass spectrometry (MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy reveal abundant nitrogen-containing compounds in Synechococcus DOM, which may originate from degradation products of the fluorescent phycobilin pigments. Given the importance of picocyanobacteria in the global carbon cycle, our results indicate that picocyanobacteria are likely to be important sources of marine autochthonous FDOM, which may accumulate in the deep ocean.

Bioengineering of rFVIIa Biopharmaceutical and Structure Characterization for Biosimilarity Assessment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Othman Montacir

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Eptacog alfa (NovoSeven® is a vitamin K-dependent recombinant Factor VIIa produced by genetic engineering from baby hamster kidney (BHK cells as a single peptide chain of 406 residues. After activation, it consists of a light chain (LC of 152 amino and a heavy chain (HC of 254 amino acids. Recombinant FVIIa undergoes many post-translational modifications (PTMs. The first ten glutamic acids of the N-terminal moiety are γ-carboxylated, Asn145 and Asn322 are N-glycosylated, and Ser52 and Ser60 are O-glycosylated. A head-to-head biosimilarity study was conducted for the originator and the first biosimilar AryoSeven™ to evaluate comparable bioengineering. Physicochemical properties were analyzed based on mass spectrometry, including intact mass, PTMs and higher-order structure. Both biotherapeutics exhibit a batch-to-batch variability in their N-glycan profiles. N-Glycopeptide analysis with UHPLC-QTOF-MSE confirmed N-glycosylation sites as well as two different O-glycopeptide sites. Ser60 was found to be O-fucosylated and Ser52 had O-glucose or O-glucose-(xylose1,2 motifs as glycan variants. Ion mobility spectrometry (TWIMS and NMR spectroscopy data affirm close similarity of the higher-order structure of both biologicals. Potency of the biodrugs was analyzed by a coagulation assay demonstrating comparable bioactivity. Consequently, careful process optimization led to a stable production process of the biopharmaceuticals.

7 CFR 51.3202 - Similar varietal characteristics.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Similar varietal characteristics. 51.3202 Section 51.3202 Agriculture Regulations of the Department of Agriculture AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE (Standards... Similar varietal characteristics. Similar varietal characteristics means that the onions in any container...

Self-Similar Traffic In Wireless Networks

OpenAIRE

Jerjomins, R.; Petersons, E.

2005-01-01

Many studies have shown that traffic in Ethernet and other wired networks is self-similar. This paper reveals that wireless network traffic is also self-similar and long-range dependant by analyzing big amount of data captured from the wireless router.

7 CFR 51.763 - Similar varietal characteristics.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Similar varietal characteristics. 51.763 Section 51.763 Agriculture Regulations of the Department of Agriculture AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE (Standards... characteristics. Similar varietal characteristics means that the fruits in any container are similar in color and...

7 CFR 51.3057 - Similar varietal characteristics.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Similar varietal characteristics. 51.3057 Section 51.3057 Agriculture Regulations of the Department of Agriculture AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE (Standards... characteristics. Similar varietal characteristics means that the avocados in any container are similar in shape...

7 CFR 51.2650 - Similar varietal characteristics.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Similar varietal characteristics. 51.2650 Section 51.2650 Agriculture Regulations of the Department of Agriculture AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE (Standards... characteristics. Similar varietal characteristics means that the cherries in any container are similar in color...

Similarity analysis between chromosomes of Homo sapiens and monkeys with correlation coefficient, rank correlation coefficient and cosine similarity measures

OpenAIRE

Someswara Rao, Chinta; Viswanadha Raju, S.

2016-01-01

In this paper, we consider correlation coefficient, rank correlation coefficient and cosine similarity measures for evaluating similarity between Homo sapiens and monkeys. We used DNA chromosomes of genome wide genes to determine the correlation between the chromosomal content and evolutionary relationship. The similarity among the H. sapiens and monkeys is measured for a total of 210 chromosomes related to 10 species. The similarity measures of these different species show the relationship b...

Functional similarities between pigeon 'milk' and mammalian milk: induction of immune gene expression and modification of the microbiota.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Meagan J Gillespie

Full Text Available Pigeon 'milk' and mammalian milk have functional similarities in terms of nutritional benefit and delivery of immunoglobulins to the young. Mammalian milk has been clearly shown to aid in the development of the immune system and microbiota of the young, but similar effects have not yet been attributed to pigeon 'milk'. Therefore, using a chicken model, we investigated the effect of pigeon 'milk' on immune gene expression in the Gut Associated Lymphoid Tissue (GALT and on the composition of the caecal microbiota. Chickens fed pigeon 'milk' had a faster rate of growth and a better feed conversion ratio than control chickens. There was significantly enhanced expression of immune-related gene pathways and interferon-stimulated genes in the GALT of pigeon 'milk'-fed chickens. These pathways include the innate immune response, regulation of cytokine production and regulation of B cell activation and proliferation. The caecal microbiota of pigeon 'milk'-fed chickens was significantly more diverse than control chickens, and appears to be affected by prebiotics in pigeon 'milk', as well as being directly seeded by bacteria present in pigeon 'milk'. Our results demonstrate that pigeon 'milk' has further modes of action which make it functionally similar to mammalian milk. We hypothesise that pigeon 'lactation' and mammalian lactation evolved independently but resulted in similarly functional products.

The baryonic self similarity of dark matter

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Alard, C.

2014-01-01

The cosmological simulations indicates that dark matter halos have specific self-similar properties. However, the halo similarity is affected by the baryonic feedback. By using momentum-driven winds as a model to represent the baryon feedback, an equilibrium condition is derived which directly implies the emergence of a new type of similarity. The new self-similar solution has constant acceleration at a reference radius for both dark matter and baryons. This model receives strong support from the observations of galaxies. The new self-similar properties imply that the total acceleration at larger distances is scale-free, the transition between the dark matter and baryons dominated regime occurs at a constant acceleration, and the maximum amplitude of the velocity curve at larger distances is proportional to M 1/4 . These results demonstrate that this self-similar model is consistent with the basics of modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) phenomenology. In agreement with the observations, the coincidence between the self-similar model and MOND breaks at the scale of clusters of galaxies. Some numerical experiments show that the behavior of the density near the origin is closely approximated by a Einasto profile.

Investigation on the effect of nonlinear processes on similarity law in high-pressure argon discharges

Science.gov (United States)

Fu, Yangyang; Parsey, Guy M.; Verboncoeur, John P.; Christlieb, Andrew J.

2017-11-01

In this paper, the effect of nonlinear processes (such as three-body collisions and stepwise ionizations) on the similarity law in high-pressure argon discharges has been studied by the use of the Kinetic Global Model framework. In the discharge model, the ground state argon atoms (Ar), electrons (e), atom ions (Ar+), molecular ions (Ar2+), and fourteen argon excited levels Ar*(4s and 4p) are considered. The steady-state electron and ion densities are obtained with nonlinear processes included and excluded in the designed models, respectively. It is found that in similar gas gaps, keeping the product of gas pressure and linear dimension unchanged, with the nonlinear processes included, the normalized density relations deviate from the similarity relations gradually as the scale-up factor decreases. Without the nonlinear processes, the parameter relations are in good agreement with the similarity law predictions. Furthermore, the pressure and the dimension effects are also investigated separately with and without the nonlinear processes. It is shown that the gas pressure effect on the results is less obvious than the dimension effect. Without the nonlinear processes, the pressure and the dimension effects could be estimated from one to the other based on the similarity relations.

7 CFR 51.567 - Similar varietal characteristics.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Similar varietal characteristics. 51.567 Section 51... STANDARDS) United States Standards for Celery Definitions § 51.567 Similar varietal characteristics. Similar varietal characteristics means that the stalks in any package have the same general appearance and...

Hilar cholangiocarcinoma is pathologically similar to pancreatic duct adenocarcinoma: suggestions of similar background and development.

Science.gov (United States)

Nakanuma, Yasuni; Sato, Yasunori

2014-07-01

Routine experiences suggest that cholangiocarcinomas (CCAs) show different clinicopathological behaviors along the biliary tree, and hilar CCA apparently resembles pancreatic duct adenocarcinoma (PDAC). Herein, the backgrounds for these similarities were reviewed. While all cases of PDAC, hilar CCA, intrahepatic CCA (ICCA) and CCA components of combined hepatocellular-cholangiocarcinoma (cHC-CCA) were adenocarcinomas, micropapillary patterns and columnar carcinoma cells were common in PDAC and hilar CCA, and trabecular components and cuboidal carcinoma cells were common in ICCA and CCA components of cHC-CCA. Anterior gradient protein-2 and S100P were frequently expressed in perihilar CCA and PDAC, while neural cell adhesion molecule and luminal epithelial membrane antigen were common in CCA components of c-HC-CCA. Pdx1 and Hes1 were frequently and markedly expressed aberrantly in PDAC and perihilar CCA, although their expression was rare and mild in CCA components in cHC-CCA and ICCA. Hilar CCA showed a similar postoperative prognosis to PDAC but differed from ICCA and cHC-CCA. Taken together, hilar CCA may differ from ICCA and CCA components of cHC-CCA but have a similar development to PDAC. These similarities may be explained by the unique anatomical, embryological and reactive nature of the pancreatobiliary tract. Further studies of these intractable malignancies are warranted. © 2014 Japanese Society of Hepato-Biliary-Pancreatic Surgery.

Bacterial Cellulose Production from Industrial Waste and by-Product Streams

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Erminda Tsouko

2015-07-01

Full Text Available The utilization of fermentation media derived from waste and by-product streams from biodiesel and confectionery industries could lead to highly efficient production of bacterial cellulose. Batch fermentations with the bacterial strain Komagataeibacter sucrofermentans DSM (Deutsche Sammlung von Mikroorganismen 15973 were initially carried out in synthetic media using commercial sugars and crude glycerol. The highest bacterial cellulose concentration was achieved when crude glycerol (3.2 g/L and commercial sucrose (4.9 g/L were used. The combination of crude glycerol and sunflower meal hydrolysates as the sole fermentation media resulted in bacterial cellulose production of 13.3 g/L. Similar results (13 g/L were obtained when flour-rich hydrolysates produced from confectionery industry waste streams were used. The properties of bacterial celluloses developed when different fermentation media were used showed water holding capacities of 102–138 g·water/g·dry bacterial cellulose, viscosities of 4.7–9.3 dL/g, degree of polymerization of 1889.1–2672.8, stress at break of 72.3–139.5 MPa and Young’s modulus of 0.97–1.64 GPa. This study demonstrated that by-product streams from the biodiesel industry and waste streams from confectionery industries could be used as the sole sources of nutrients for the production of bacterial cellulose with similar properties as those produced with commercial sources of nutrients.

"The same thing in a different box": similarity and difference in pharmaceutical sex hormone consumption and marketing.

Science.gov (United States)

Sanabria, Emilia

2014-12-01

The contraceptive pill has given way to a multitude of products, kinds of packaging, and modes of administration. This article draws on work on the pharmaceutical copy, extending the analysis to differentiating between forms of administration for contraceptive medicines as well as between brand-name drugs, generics, and similares, as they are known in Brazil. It explores how Brazilian prescribers and users-within the divergent structural constraints afforded by private and public health-apprehend and negotiate distinctions between the drugs available to them. This ethnographic account of hormone use reveals new fault lines through which the pharmakon exerts its influence. The attention that industry places on pharmacodynamics as it produces new products from similar compounds suggests that pharmaceutical effects are at once symbolic and real. The article concludes with a reflection on the future of the generic form in a field increasingly crowded by branded copies. © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association.

Measure of Node Similarity in Multilayer Networks.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anders Mollgaard

Full Text Available The weight of links in a network is often related to the similarity of the nodes. Here, we introduce a simple tunable measure for analysing the similarity of nodes across different link weights. In particular, we use the measure to analyze homophily in a group of 659 freshman students at a large university. Our analysis is based on data obtained using smartphones equipped with custom data collection software, complemented by questionnaire-based data. The network of social contacts is represented as a weighted multilayer network constructed from different channels of telecommunication as well as data on face-to-face contacts. We find that even strongly connected individuals are not more similar with respect to basic personality traits than randomly chosen pairs of individuals. In contrast, several socio-demographics variables have a significant degree of similarity. We further observe that similarity might be present in one layer of the multilayer network and simultaneously be absent in the other layers. For a variable such as gender, our measure reveals a transition from similarity between nodes connected with links of relatively low weight to dis-similarity for the nodes connected by the strongest links. We finally analyze the overlap between layers in the network for different levels of acquaintanceships.

Large margin classification with indefinite similarities

KAUST Repository

Alabdulmohsin, Ibrahim

2016-01-07

Classification with indefinite similarities has attracted attention in the machine learning community. This is partly due to the fact that many similarity functions that arise in practice are not symmetric positive semidefinite, i.e. the Mercer condition is not satisfied, or the Mercer condition is difficult to verify. Examples of such indefinite similarities in machine learning applications are ample including, for instance, the BLAST similarity score between protein sequences, human-judged similarities between concepts and words, and the tangent distance or the shape matching distance in computer vision. Nevertheless, previous works on classification with indefinite similarities are not fully satisfactory. They have either introduced sources of inconsistency in handling past and future examples using kernel approximation, settled for local-minimum solutions using non-convex optimization, or produced non-sparse solutions by learning in Krein spaces. Despite the large volume of research devoted to this subject lately, we demonstrate in this paper how an old idea, namely the 1-norm support vector machine (SVM) proposed more than 15 years ago, has several advantages over more recent work. In particular, the 1-norm SVM method is conceptually simpler, which makes it easier to implement and maintain. It is competitive, if not superior to, all other methods in terms of predictive accuracy. Moreover, it produces solutions that are often sparser than more recent methods by several orders of magnitude. In addition, we provide various theoretical justifications by relating 1-norm SVM to well-established learning algorithms such as neural networks, SVM, and nearest neighbor classifiers. Finally, we conduct a thorough experimental evaluation, which reveals that the evidence in favor of 1-norm SVM is statistically significant.

GOssTo: a stand-alone application and a web tool for calculating semantic similarities on the Gene Ontology.

Science.gov (United States)

Caniza, Horacio; Romero, Alfonso E; Heron, Samuel; Yang, Haixuan; Devoto, Alessandra; Frasca, Marco; Mesiti, Marco; Valentini, Giorgio; Paccanaro, Alberto

2014-08-01

We present GOssTo, the Gene Ontology semantic similarity Tool, a user-friendly software system for calculating semantic similarities between gene products according to the Gene Ontology. GOssTo is bundled with six semantic similarity measures, including both term- and graph-based measures, and has extension capabilities to allow the user to add new similarities. Importantly, for any measure, GOssTo can also calculate the Random Walk Contribution that has been shown to greatly improve the accuracy of similarity measures. GOssTo is very fast, easy to use, and it allows the calculation of similarities on a genomic scale in a few minutes on a regular desktop machine. alberto@cs.rhul.ac.uk GOssTo is available both as a stand-alone application running on GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS from www.paccanarolab.org/gossto and as a web application from www.paccanarolab.org/gosstoweb. The stand-alone application features a simple and concise command line interface for easy integration into high-throughput data processing pipelines. © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press.

Bilateral export trade and income similarity: Does the Linder hypothesis hold for agricultural and food trade?

OpenAIRE

Steinbach, Sandro

2015-01-01

In this paper we invesƟgate the Linder hypothesis for bilateral export trade in agricultural and food products by uƟlizing the sectoral gravity equaƟon derived in Hallak (2010). Based on a sample of 152 countries, we study the relaƟonship for 737 agricultural and food products at the 6-digit HS code level, using trade data for 1995-2012. We esƟmate the gravity equaƟon year by and year and sector by sector, analyzing the esƟmates of Linder's term for two specificaƟons of the similarity index. W...

An Optimization Model for Product Placement on Product Listing Pages

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yan-Kwang Chen

2014-01-01

Full Text Available The design of product listing pages is a key component of Website design because it has significant influence on the sales volume on a Website. This study focuses on product placement in designing product listing pages. Product placement concerns how venders of online stores place their products over the product listing pages for maximization of profit. This problem is very similar to the offline shelf management problem. Since product information sources on a Web page are typically communicated through the text and image, visual stimuli such as color, shape, size, and spatial arrangement often have an effect on the visual attention of online shoppers and, in turn, influence their eventual purchase decisions. In view of the above, this study synthesizes the visual attention literature and theory of shelf-space allocation to develop a mathematical programming model with genetic algorithms for finding optimal solutions to the focused issue. The validity of the model is illustrated with example problems.

Scalar Similarity for Relaxed Eddy Accumulation Methods

Science.gov (United States)

Ruppert, Johannes; Thomas, Christoph; Foken, Thomas

2006-07-01

The relaxed eddy accumulation (REA) method allows the measurement of trace gas fluxes when no fast sensors are available for eddy covariance measurements. The flux parameterisation used in REA is based on the assumption of scalar similarity, i.e., similarity of the turbulent exchange of two scalar quantities. In this study changes in scalar similarity between carbon dioxide, sonic temperature and water vapour were assessed using scalar correlation coefficients and spectral analysis. The influence on REA measurements was assessed by simulation. The evaluation is based on observations over grassland, irrigated cotton plantation and spruce forest. Scalar similarity between carbon dioxide, sonic temperature and water vapour showed a distinct diurnal pattern and change within the day. Poor scalar similarity was found to be linked to dissimilarities in the energy contained in the low frequency part of the turbulent spectra ( definition.

Self-Similar Spin Images for Point Cloud Matching

Science.gov (United States)

Pulido, Daniel

The rapid growth of Light Detection And Ranging (Lidar) technologies that collect, process, and disseminate 3D point clouds have allowed for increasingly accurate spatial modeling and analysis of the real world. Lidar sensors can generate massive 3D point clouds of a collection area that provide highly detailed spatial and radiometric information. However, a Lidar collection can be expensive and time consuming. Simultaneously, the growth of crowdsourced Web 2.0 data (e.g., Flickr, OpenStreetMap) have provided researchers with a wealth of freely available data sources that cover a variety of geographic areas. Crowdsourced data can be of varying quality and density. In addition, since it is typically not collected as part of a dedicated experiment but rather volunteered, when and where the data is collected is arbitrary. The integration of these two sources of geoinformation can provide researchers the ability to generate products and derive intelligence that mitigate their respective disadvantages and combine their advantages. Therefore, this research will address the problem of fusing two point clouds from potentially different sources. Specifically, we will consider two problems: scale matching and feature matching. Scale matching consists of computing feature metrics of each point cloud and analyzing their distributions to determine scale differences. Feature matching consists of defining local descriptors that are invariant to common dataset distortions (e.g., rotation and translation). Additionally, after matching the point clouds they can be registered and processed further (e.g., change detection). The objective of this research is to develop novel methods to fuse and enhance two point clouds from potentially disparate sources (e.g., Lidar and crowdsourced Web 2.0 datasets). The scope of this research is to investigate both scale and feature matching between two point clouds. The specific focus of this research will be in developing a novel local descriptor

LCA of metal nanomaterial production

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Miseljic, Mirko; Diaz, Elsa Gabriela Alvarado; Olsen, Stig Irving

The use of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) in commercial product has reached a new stage, where consumers in their daily life are frequently encountered with products containing this new material class. Metal and metal-oxide nanomaterials are among the most commonly used ENMs in products. Potential......(OH)2 applied as additives in polypropylene (PP), and the production of PP with conventional additives that provide similar properties as the ENMs. Different scenarios of nanoproducts consisting of metal ENMs and PP were compared with current use of additives in PP products through a detailed cradle...

Nanotechnology in stem cells research: advances and applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Deb, Kaushik Dilip; Griffith, May; Muinck, Ebo De; Rafat, Mehrdad

2012-01-01

Human beings suffer from a myriad of disorders caused by biochemical or biophysical alteration of physiological systems leading to organ failure. For a number of these conditions, stem cells and their enormous reparative potential may be the last hope for restoring function to these failing organ or tissue systems. To harness the potential of stem cells for biotherapeutic applications, we need to work at the size scale of molecules and processes that govern stem cells fate. Nanotechnology provides us with such capacity. Therefore, effective amalgamation of nanotechnology and stem cells - medical nanoscience or nanomedicine - offers immense benefits to the human race. The aim of this paper is to discuss the role and importance of nanotechnology in stem cell research by focusing on several important areas such as stem cell visualization and imaging, genetic modifications and reprogramming by gene delivery systems, creating stem cell niche, and similar therapeutic applications.

A similarity score-based two-phase heuristic approach to solve the dynamic cellular facility layout for manufacturing systems

Science.gov (United States)

Kumar, Ravi; Singh, Surya Prakash

2017-11-01

The dynamic cellular facility layout problem (DCFLP) is a well-known NP-hard problem. It has been estimated that the efficient design of DCFLP reduces the manufacturing cost of products by maintaining the minimum material flow among all machines in all cells, as the material flow contributes around 10-30% of the total product cost. However, being NP hard, solving the DCFLP optimally is very difficult in reasonable time. Therefore, this article proposes a novel similarity score-based two-phase heuristic approach to solve the DCFLP optimally considering multiple products in multiple times to be manufactured in the manufacturing layout. In the first phase of the proposed heuristic, a machine-cell cluster is created based on similarity scores between machines. This is provided as an input to the second phase to minimize inter/intracell material handling costs and rearrangement costs over the entire planning period. The solution methodology of the proposed approach is demonstrated. To show the efficiency of the two-phase heuristic approach, 21 instances are generated and solved using the optimization software package LINGO. The results show that the proposed approach can optimally solve the DCFLP in reasonable time.

Comparing Harmonic Similarity Measures

NARCIS (Netherlands)

de Haas, W.B.; Robine, M.; Hanna, P.; Veltkamp, R.C.; Wiering, F.

2010-01-01

We present an overview of the most recent developments in polyphonic music retrieval and an experiment in which we compare two harmonic similarity measures. In contrast to earlier work, in this paper we specifically focus on the symbolic chord description as the primary musical representation and

A Similarity Analysis of Audio Signal to Develop a Human Activity Recognition Using Similarity Networks

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alejandra García-Hernández

2017-11-01

Full Text Available Human Activity Recognition (HAR is one of the main subjects of study in the areas of computer vision and machine learning due to the great benefits that can be achieved. Examples of the study areas are: health prevention, security and surveillance, automotive research, and many others. The proposed approaches are carried out using machine learning techniques and present good results. However, it is difficult to observe how the descriptors of human activities are grouped. In order to obtain a better understanding of the the behavior of descriptors, it is important to improve the abilities to recognize the human activities. This paper proposes a novel approach for the HAR based on acoustic data and similarity networks. In this approach, we were able to characterize the sound of the activities and identify those activities looking for similarity in the sound pattern. We evaluated the similarity of the sounds considering mainly two features: the sound location and the materials that were used. As a result, the materials are a good reference classifying the human activities compared with the location.

Correlation between social proximity and mobility similarity.

Science.gov (United States)

Fan, Chao; Liu, Yiding; Huang, Junming; Rong, Zhihai; Zhou, Tao

2017-09-20

Human behaviors exhibit ubiquitous correlations in many aspects, such as individual and collective levels, temporal and spatial dimensions, content, social and geographical layers. With rich Internet data of online behaviors becoming available, it attracts academic interests to explore human mobility similarity from the perspective of social network proximity. Existent analysis shows a strong correlation between online social proximity and offline mobility similarity, namely, mobile records between friends are significantly more similar than between strangers, and those between friends with common neighbors are even more similar. We argue the importance of the number and diversity of common friends, with a counter intuitive finding that the number of common friends has no positive impact on mobility similarity while the diversity plays a key role, disagreeing with previous studies. Our analysis provides a novel view for better understanding the coupling between human online and offline behaviors, and will help model and predict human behaviors based on social proximity.

Self-similar analysis of the spherical implosion process

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ishiguro, Yukio; Katsuragi, Satoru.

1976-07-01

The implosion processes caused by laser-heating ablation has been studied by self-similarity analysis. Attention is paid to the possibility of existence of the self-similar solution which reproduces the implosion process of high compression. Details of the self-similar analysis are reproduced and conclusions are drawn quantitatively on the gas compression by a single shock. The compression process by a sequence of shocks is discussed in self-similarity. The gas motion followed by a homogeneous isentropic compression is represented by a self-similar motion. (auth.)

Protein structural similarity search by Ramachandran codes

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Chang Chih-Hung

2007-08-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Protein structural data has increased exponentially, such that fast and accurate tools are necessary to access structure similarity search. To improve the search speed, several methods have been designed to reduce three-dimensional protein structures to one-dimensional text strings that are then analyzed by traditional sequence alignment methods; however, the accuracy is usually sacrificed and the speed is still unable to match sequence similarity search tools. Here, we aimed to improve the linear encoding methodology and develop efficient search tools that can rapidly retrieve structural homologs from large protein databases. Results We propose a new linear encoding method, SARST (Structural similarity search Aided by Ramachandran Sequential Transformation. SARST transforms protein structures into text strings through a Ramachandran map organized by nearest-neighbor clustering and uses a regenerative approach to produce substitution matrices. Then, classical sequence similarity search methods can be applied to the structural similarity search. Its accuracy is similar to Combinatorial Extension (CE and works over 243,000 times faster, searching 34,000 proteins in 0.34 sec with a 3.2-GHz CPU. SARST provides statistically meaningful expectation values to assess the retrieved information. It has been implemented into a web service and a stand-alone Java program that is able to run on many different platforms. Conclusion As a database search method, SARST can rapidly distinguish high from low similarities and efficiently retrieve homologous structures. It demonstrates that the easily accessible linear encoding methodology has the potential to serve as a foundation for efficient protein structural similarity search tools. These search tools are supposed applicable to automated and high-throughput functional annotations or predictions for the ever increasing number of published protein structures in this post-genomic era.

Parallel trajectory similarity joins in spatial networks

KAUST Repository

Shang, Shuo

2018-04-04

The matching of similar pairs of objects, called similarity join, is fundamental functionality in data management. We consider two cases of trajectory similarity joins (TS-Joins), including a threshold-based join (Tb-TS-Join) and a top-k TS-Join (k-TS-Join), where the objects are trajectories of vehicles moving in road networks. Given two sets of trajectories and a threshold θ, the Tb-TS-Join returns all pairs of trajectories from the two sets with similarity above θ. In contrast, the k-TS-Join does not take a threshold as a parameter, and it returns the top-k most similar trajectory pairs from the two sets. The TS-Joins target diverse applications such as trajectory near-duplicate detection, data cleaning, ridesharing recommendation, and traffic congestion prediction. With these applications in mind, we provide purposeful definitions of similarity. To enable efficient processing of the TS-Joins on large sets of trajectories, we develop search space pruning techniques and enable use of the parallel processing capabilities of modern processors. Specifically, we present a two-phase divide-and-conquer search framework that lays the foundation for the algorithms for the Tb-TS-Join and the k-TS-Join that rely on different pruning techniques to achieve efficiency. For each trajectory, the algorithms first find similar trajectories. Then they merge the results to obtain the final result. The algorithms for the two joins exploit different upper and lower bounds on the spatiotemporal trajectory similarity and different heuristic scheduling strategies for search space pruning. Their per-trajectory searches are independent of each other and can be performed in parallel, and the mergings have constant cost. An empirical study with real data offers insight in the performance of the algorithms and demonstrates that they are capable of outperforming well-designed baseline algorithms by an order of magnitude.

Parallel trajectory similarity joins in spatial networks

KAUST Repository

Shang, Shuo; Chen, Lisi; Wei, Zhewei; Jensen, Christian S.; Zheng, Kai; Kalnis, Panos

2018-01-01

The matching of similar pairs of objects, called similarity join, is fundamental functionality in data management. We consider two cases of trajectory similarity joins (TS-Joins), including a threshold-based join (Tb-TS-Join) and a top-k TS-Join (k-TS-Join), where the objects are trajectories of vehicles moving in road networks. Given two sets of trajectories and a threshold θ, the Tb-TS-Join returns all pairs of trajectories from the two sets with similarity above θ. In contrast, the k-TS-Join does not take a threshold as a parameter, and it returns the top-k most similar trajectory pairs from the two sets. The TS-Joins target diverse applications such as trajectory near-duplicate detection, data cleaning, ridesharing recommendation, and traffic congestion prediction. With these applications in mind, we provide purposeful definitions of similarity. To enable efficient processing of the TS-Joins on large sets of trajectories, we develop search space pruning techniques and enable use of the parallel processing capabilities of modern processors. Specifically, we present a two-phase divide-and-conquer search framework that lays the foundation for the algorithms for the Tb-TS-Join and the k-TS-Join that rely on different pruning techniques to achieve efficiency. For each trajectory, the algorithms first find similar trajectories. Then they merge the results to obtain the final result. The algorithms for the two joins exploit different upper and lower bounds on the spatiotemporal trajectory similarity and different heuristic scheduling strategies for search space pruning. Their per-trajectory searches are independent of each other and can be performed in parallel, and the mergings have constant cost. An empirical study with real data offers insight in the performance of the algorithms and demonstrates that they are capable of outperforming well-designed baseline algorithms by an order of magnitude.

Are calanco landforms similar to river basins?

Science.gov (United States)

Caraballo-Arias, N A; Ferro, V

2017-12-15

In the past badlands have been often considered as ideal field laboratories for studying landscape evolution because of their geometrical similarity to larger fluvial systems. For a given hydrological process, no scientific proof exists that badlands can be considered a model of river basin prototypes. In this paper the measurements carried out on 45 Sicilian calanchi, a type of badlands that appears as a small-scale hydrographic unit, are used to establish their morphological similarity with river systems whose data are available in the literature. At first the geomorphological similarity is studied by identifying the dimensionless groups, which can assume the same value or a scaled one in a fixed ratio, representing drainage basin shape, stream network and relief properties. Then, for each property, the dimensionless groups are calculated for the investigated calanchi and the river basins and their corresponding scale ratio is evaluated. The applicability of Hack's, Horton's and Melton's laws for establishing similarity criteria is also tested. The developed analysis allows to conclude that a quantitative morphological similarity between calanco landforms and river basins can be established using commonly applied dimensionless groups. In particular, the analysis showed that i) calanchi and river basins have a geometrically similar shape respect to the parameters Rf and Re with a scale factor close to 1, ii) calanchi and river basins are similar respect to the bifurcation and length ratios (λ=1), iii) for the investigated calanchi the Melton number assumes values less than that (0.694) corresponding to the river case and a scale ratio ranging from 0.52 and 0.78 can be used, iv) calanchi and river basins have similar mean relief ratio values (λ=1.13) and v) calanchi present active geomorphic processes and therefore fall in a more juvenile stage with respect to river basins. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Representational Similarity Analysis Reveals Heterogeneous Networks Supporting Speech Motor Control

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Zheng, Zane; Cusack, Rhodri; Johnsrude, Ingrid

The everyday act of speaking involves the complex processes of speech motor control. One important feature of such control is regulation of articulation when auditory concomitants of speech do not correspond to the intended motor gesture. While theoretical accounts of speech monitoring posit...... multiple functional components required for detection of errors in speech planning (e.g., Levelt, 1983), neuroimaging studies generally indicate either single brain regions sensitive to speech production errors, or small, discrete networks. Here we demonstrate that the complex system controlling speech...... is supported by a complex neural network that is involved in linguistic, motoric and sensory processing. With the aid of novel real-time acoustic analyses and representational similarity analyses of fMRI signals, our data show functionally differentiated networks underlying auditory feedback control of speech....

Similarities and differences in coatings for magnesium-based stents and orthopaedic implants

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jun Ma

2014-07-01

Full Text Available Magnesium (Mg-based biodegradable materials are promising candidates for the new generation of implantable medical devices, particularly cardiovascular stents and orthopaedic implants. Mg-based cardiovascular stents represent the most innovative stent technology to date. However, these products still do not fully meet clinical requirements with regards to fast degradation rates, late restenosis, and thrombosis. Thus various surface coatings have been introduced to protect Mg-based stents from rapid corrosion and to improve biocompatibility. Similarly, different coatings have been used for orthopaedic implants, e.g., plates and pins for bone fracture fixation or as an interference screw for tendon-bone or ligament-bone insertion, to improve biocompatibility and corrosion resistance. Metal coatings, nanoporous inorganic coatings and permanent polymers have been proved to enhance corrosion resistance; however, inflammation and foreign body reactions have also been reported. By contrast, biodegradable polymers are more biocompatible in general and are favoured over permanent materials. Drugs are also loaded with biodegradable polymers to improve their performance. The key similarities and differences in coatings for Mg-based stents and orthopaedic implants are summarized.

Neutrosophic Refined Similarity Measure Based on Cosine Function

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Said Broumi

2014-12-01

Full Text Available In this paper, the cosine similarity measure of neutrosophic refined (multi- sets is proposed and its properties are studied. The concept of this cosine similarity measure of neutrosophic refined sets is the extension of improved cosine similarity measure of single valued neutrosophic. Finally, using this cosine similarity measure of neutrosophic refined set, the application of medical diagnosis is presented.

Similarities between the target and the intruder in naturally-occurring repeated person naming errors

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Serge eBredart

2015-09-01

Full Text Available The present study investigated an intriguing phenomenon that did not receive much attention so far: repeatedly calling a familiar person with someone else’s name. From participants’ responses to a questionnaire, these repeated naming errors were characterized with respect to a number of properties (e.g., type of names being substituted, error frequency, error longevity and different features of similarity (e.g., age, gender, type of relationship with the participant, face resemblance and similarity of the contexts of encounter between the bearer of the target name and the bearer of the wrong name. Moreover, it was evaluated whether the phonological similarity between names, the participants’ age, the difference of age between the two persons whose names were substituted, and face resemblance between the two persons predicted the frequency of error. Regression analyses indicated that phonological similarity between the target name and the wrong name predicted the frequency of repeated person naming errors. The age of the participant was also a significant predictor of error frequency: the older the participant the higher the frequency of errors. Consistent with previous research stressing the importance of the age of acquisition of words on lexical access in speech production, results indicated that bearer of the wrong name was on average known for longer than the bearer of the target name.

The 17D-204 and 17DD yellow fever vaccines: an overview of major similarities and subtle differences.

Science.gov (United States)

Ferreira, Clarissa de Castro; Campi-Azevedo, Ana Carolina; Peruhype-Magalhāes, Vanessa; Costa-Pereira, Christiane; Albuquerque, Cleandro Pires de; Muniz, Luciana Feitosa; Yokoy de Souza, Talita; Oliveira, Ana Cristina Vanderley; Martins-Filho, Olindo Assis; da Mota, Licia Maria Henrique

2018-01-01

The yellow fever vaccine is a live attenuated virus vaccine that is considered one of the most efficient vaccines produced to date. The original 17D strain generated the substrains 17D-204 and 17DD, which are used for the current production of vaccines against yellow fever. The 17D-204 and 17DD substrains present subtle differences in their nucleotide compositions, which can potentially lead to variations in immunogenicity and reactogenicity. We will address the main changes in the immune responses induced by the 17D-204 and 17DD yellow fever vaccines and report similarities and differences between these vaccines in cellular and humoral immunity . This is a relevant issue in view of the re-emergence of yellow fever in Uganda in 2016 and in Brazil in the beginning of 2017. Areas covered: This article will be divided into 8 sections that will analyze the innate immune response, adaptive immune response, humoral response, production of cytokines, immunity in children, immunity in the elderly, gene expression and adverse reactions. Expert commentary: The 17D-204 and 17DD yellow fever vaccines present similar immunogenicity, with strong activation of the cellular and humoral immune responses. Additionally, both vaccines have similar adverse effects, which are mostly mild and thus are considered safe.

Beneficial properties of probiotic yeast Saccharomyces boulardii

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tomičić Zorica M.

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Saccharomyces boulardii is unique probiotic and biotherapeutic yeast, known to survive in gastric acidity and it is not adversely affected or inhibited by antibiotics or does not alter or adversely affect the normal microbiota. S. boulardii has been utilized worldwide as a probiotic supplement to support gastrointestinal health. The multiple mechanisms of action of S. boulardii and its properties may explain its efficacy and beneficial effects in acute and chronic gastrointestinal diseases that have been confirmed by clinical trials. Caution should be taken in patients with risk factors for adverse events. Its potential application in various dairy foods could offer an alternative probiotic product to people suffering from antibiotic-associated diarrhea. This review discusses the evidence for efficacy and safety of S. boulardii as a probiotic for the prevention and therapy of gastrointestinal disorders in humans.

Rational Selection, Criticality Assessment, and Tiering of Quality Attributes and Test Methods for Analytical Similarity Evaluation of Biosimilars.

Science.gov (United States)

Vandekerckhove, Kristof; Seidl, Andreas; Gutka, Hiten; Kumar, Manish; Gratzl, Gyöngyi; Keire, David; Coffey, Todd; Kuehne, Henriette

2018-05-10

Leading regulatory agencies recommend biosimilar assessment to proceed in a stepwise fashion, starting with a detailed analytical comparison of the structural and functional properties of the proposed biosimilar and reference product. The degree of analytical similarity determines the degree of residual uncertainty that must be addressed through downstream in vivo studies. Substantive evidence of similarity from comprehensive analytical testing may justify a targeted clinical development plan, and thus enable a shorter path to licensing. The importance of a careful design of the analytical similarity study program therefore should not be underestimated. Designing a state-of-the-art analytical similarity study meeting current regulatory requirements in regions such as the USA and EU requires a methodical approach, consisting of specific steps that far precede the work on the actual analytical study protocol. This white paper discusses scientific and methodological considerations on the process of attribute and test method selection, criticality assessment, and subsequent assignment of analytical measures to US FDA's three tiers of analytical similarity assessment. Case examples of selection of critical quality attributes and analytical methods for similarity exercises are provided to illustrate the practical implementation of the principles discussed.

Universal self-similarity of propagating populations.

Science.gov (United States)

Eliazar, Iddo; Klafter, Joseph

2010-07-01

This paper explores the universal self-similarity of propagating populations. The following general propagation model is considered: particles are randomly emitted from the origin of a d-dimensional Euclidean space and propagate randomly and independently of each other in space; all particles share a statistically common--yet arbitrary--motion pattern; each particle has its own random propagation parameters--emission epoch, motion frequency, and motion amplitude. The universally self-similar statistics of the particles' displacements and first passage times (FPTs) are analyzed: statistics which are invariant with respect to the details of the displacement and FPT measurements and with respect to the particles' underlying motion pattern. Analysis concludes that the universally self-similar statistics are governed by Poisson processes with power-law intensities and by the Fréchet and Weibull extreme-value laws.

Universal self-similarity of propagating populations

Science.gov (United States)

Eliazar, Iddo; Klafter, Joseph

2010-07-01

This paper explores the universal self-similarity of propagating populations. The following general propagation model is considered: particles are randomly emitted from the origin of a d -dimensional Euclidean space and propagate randomly and independently of each other in space; all particles share a statistically common—yet arbitrary—motion pattern; each particle has its own random propagation parameters—emission epoch, motion frequency, and motion amplitude. The universally self-similar statistics of the particles’ displacements and first passage times (FPTs) are analyzed: statistics which are invariant with respect to the details of the displacement and FPT measurements and with respect to the particles’ underlying motion pattern. Analysis concludes that the universally self-similar statistics are governed by Poisson processes with power-law intensities and by the Fréchet and Weibull extreme-value laws.

A Novel Hybrid Similarity Calculation Model

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Xiaoping Fan

2017-01-01

Full Text Available This paper addresses the problems of similarity calculation in the traditional recommendation algorithms of nearest neighbor collaborative filtering, especially the failure in describing dynamic user preference. Proceeding from the perspective of solving the problem of user interest drift, a new hybrid similarity calculation model is proposed in this paper. This model consists of two parts, on the one hand the model uses the function fitting to describe users’ rating behaviors and their rating preferences, and on the other hand it employs the Random Forest algorithm to take user attribute features into account. Furthermore, the paper combines the two parts to build a new hybrid similarity calculation model for user recommendation. Experimental results show that, for data sets of different size, the model’s prediction precision is higher than the traditional recommendation algorithms.

Semantic similarity between ontologies at different scales

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Zhang, Qingpeng; Haglin, David J.

2016-04-01

In the past decade, existing and new knowledge and datasets has been encoded in different ontologies for semantic web and biomedical research. The size of ontologies is often very large in terms of number of concepts and relationships, which makes the analysis of ontologies and the represented knowledge graph computational and time consuming. As the ontologies of various semantic web and biomedical applications usually show explicit hierarchical structures, it is interesting to explore the trade-offs between ontological scales and preservation/precision of results when we analyze ontologies. This paper presents the first effort of examining the capability of this idea via studying the relationship between scaling biomedical ontologies at different levels and the semantic similarity values. We evaluate the semantic similarity between three Gene Ontology slims (Plant, Yeast, and Candida, among which the latter two belong to the same kingdom—Fungi) using four popular measures commonly applied to biomedical ontologies (Resnik, Lin, Jiang-Conrath, and SimRel). The results of this study demonstrate that with proper selection of scaling levels and similarity measures, we can significantly reduce the size of ontologies without losing substantial detail. In particular, the performance of Jiang-Conrath and Lin are more reliable and stable than that of the other two in this experiment, as proven by (a) consistently showing that Yeast and Candida are more similar (as compared to Plant) at different scales, and (b) small deviations of the similarity values after excluding a majority of nodes from several lower scales. This study provides a deeper understanding of the application of semantic similarity to biomedical ontologies, and shed light on how to choose appropriate semantic similarity measures for biomedical engineering.

Healthcare biotechnology in India

OpenAIRE

Srivastava, L. M.

2005-01-01

Biotechnology in India has made great progress in the development of infrastructure, manpower, research and development and manufacturing of biological reagents, biodiagnostics, biotherapeutics, therapeutic and, prophylactic vaccines and biodevices. Many of these indigenous biological reagents, biodiagnostics, therapeutic and prophylactic vaccines and biodevices have been commercialized. Commercially when biotechnology revenue has reached $25 billions in the U.S. alone in 2000 excluding the r...

Newness, value and new product performance

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Trijp, van H.C.M.; Kleef, van E.

2008-01-01

Both consumers and organizations hold a dualistic attitude towards product innovativeness. Consumers are known to hold an inherent tendency to approach (neophilia) and avoid (neophobia) new food products at the same time. Similarly, at a managerial level it is not all that clear whether revenues of

75 FR 72845 - New Postal Product

Science.gov (United States)

2010-11-26

... contract for future functional equivalence analyses of the GEPS 3 product. \\1\\ Notice of United States... Classification Schedule language for the GEPS 3 product. The Postal Service identifies customer-specific... methodology, the relevant characteristics of these five GEPS contracts are similar, if not the same, as the...

An Interaction Between the Effects of Bilingualism and Cross-linguistic Similarity in Balanced and Unbalanced Bilingual Adults' L2 Mandarin Word-Reading Production.

Science.gov (United States)

Hsu, Hsiu-Ling

2017-08-01

We conducted three experiments investigating in more detail the interaction between the two effects of bilingualism and L1-L2 similarity in the speech performance of balanced and unbalanced bilinguals. In Experiment 1, L1 Mandarin monolinguals and two groups of Hakka and Minnan balanced bilinguals (Hakka: more similar to Mandarin) performed a non-contextual single-character reading task in Mandarin, which required more inhibitory control. The two bilingual groups outperformed the monolinguals, regardless of their L1 background. However, the bilingual advantage was not found in a contextual multi-word task (Experiment 2), but instead the effect of cross-linguistic similarity emerged. Furthermore, in Experiment 3, the Hakka unbalanced bilinguals showed an advantage in the non-contextual task, while their Minnan counterparts did not, and the impact of L1-L2 similarity emerged in both tasks. These results unveiled the way the two effects dynamically interplayed depending on the task contexts and the relative degrees of using L1 and L2.

Compressional Alfven Eigenmode Similarity Study

Science.gov (United States)

Heidbrink, W. W.; Fredrickson, E. D.; Gorelenkov, N. N.; Rhodes, T. L.

2004-11-01

NSTX and DIII-D are nearly ideal for Alfven eigenmode (AE) similarity experiments, having similar neutral beams, fast-ion to Alfven speed v_f/v_A, fast-ion pressure, and shape of the plasma, but with a factor of 2 difference in the major radius. Toroidicity-induced AE with ˜100 kHz frequencies were compared in an earlier study [1]; this paper focuses on higher frequency AE with f ˜ 1 MHz. Compressional AE (CAE) on NSTX have a polarization, dependence on the fast-ion distribution function, frequency scaling, and low-frequency limit that are qualitatively consistent with CAE theory [2]. Global AE (GAE) are also observed. On DIII-D, coherent modes in this frequency range are observed during low-field (0.6 T) similarity experiments. Experiments will compare the CAE stability limits on DIII-D with the NSTX stability limits, with the aim of determining if CAE will be excited by alphas in a reactor. Predicted differences in the frequency splitting Δ f between excited modes will also be used. \\vspace0.25em [1] W.W. Heidbrink, et al., Plasmas Phys. Control. Fusion 45, 983 (2003). [2] E.D. Fredrickson, et al., Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory Report PPPL-3955 (2004).

Revisiting Inter-Genre Similarity

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Sturm, Bob L.; Gouyon, Fabien

2013-01-01

We revisit the idea of ``inter-genre similarity'' (IGS) for machine learning in general, and music genre recognition in particular. We show analytically that the probability of error for IGS is higher than naive Bayes classification with zero-one loss (NB). We show empirically that IGS does...... not perform well, even for data that satisfies all its assumptions....

Trajectory similarity join in spatial networks

KAUST Repository

Shang, Shuo; Chen, Lisi; Wei, Zhewei; Jensen, Christian S.; Zheng, Kai; Kalnis, Panos

2017-01-01

With these applications in mind, we provide a purposeful definition of similarity. To enable efficient TS-Join processing on large sets of trajectories, we develop search space pruning techniques and take into account the parallel processing capabilities of modern processors. Specifically, we present a two-phase divide-and-conquer algorithm. For each trajectory, the algorithm first finds similar trajectories. Then it merges the results to achieve a final result. The algorithm exploits an upper bound on the spatiotemporal similarity and a heuristic scheduling strategy for search space pruning. The algorithm's per-trajectory searches are independent of each other and can be performed in parallel, and the merging has constant cost. An empirical study with real data offers insight in the performance of the algorithm and demonstrates that is capable of outperforming a well-designed baseline algorithm by an order of magnitude.

On Similarity Invariance of Balancing for Nonlinear Systems

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Scherpen, Jacquelien M.A.

1995-01-01

A previously obtained balancing method for nonlinear systems is investigated on similarity in variance by generalization of the observations on the similarity invariance of the linear balanced realization theory. For linear systems it is well known that the Hankel singular values are similarity

Lineup member similarity effects on children's eyewitness identification

OpenAIRE

Fitzgerald, Ryan J.; Whiting, Brittany F.; Therrien, Natalie M.; Price, Heather L.

2014-01-01

To date, research investigating the similarity among lineup members has focused on adult eyewitnesses. In the present research, children made identifications from lineups containing members of lower or higher similarity to a target person. In Experiment 1, following a live interaction, children's (6–14 years) correct identification rate was reduced in higher-similarity relative to lower-similarity lineups. In Experiment 2, children (6–12 years) and adults watched a video containing a target p...

Healthcare biotechnology in India.

Science.gov (United States)

Srivastava, L M

2005-01-01

Biotechnology in India has made great progress in the development of infrastructure, manpower, research and development and manufacturing of biological reagents, biodiagnostics, biotherapeutics, therapeutic and, prophylactic vaccines and biodevices. Many of these indigenous biological reagents, biodiagnostics, therapeutic and prophylactic vaccines and biodevices have been commercialized. Commercially when biotechnology revenue has reached $25 billions in the U.S. alone in 2000 excluding the revenues of biotech companies that were acquired by pharmaceutical companies, India has yet to register a measurable success. The conservative nature and craze of the Indian Industry for marketing imported biotechnology products, lack of Government support, almost non-existing national healthcare system and lack of trained managers for marketing biological and new products seem to be the important factors responsible for poor economic development of biotechnology in India. With the liberalization of Indian economy, more and more imported biotechnology products will enter into the Indian market. The conditions of internal development of biotechnology are not likely to improve in the near future and it is destined to grow only very slowly. Even today biotechnology in India may be called to be in its infancy.

An Alfven eigenmode similarity experiment

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Heidbrink, W W; Fredrickson, E; Gorelenkov, N N; Hyatt, A W; Kramer, G; Luo, Y

2003-01-01

The major radius dependence of Alfven mode stability is studied by creating plasmas with similar minor radius, shape, magnetic field (0.5 T), density (n e ≅3x10 19 m -3 ), electron temperature (1.0 keV) and beam ion population (near-tangential 80 keV deuterium injection) on both NSTX and DIII-D. The major radius of NSTX is half the major radius of DIII-D. The super-Alfvenic beam ions that drive the modes have overlapping values of v f /v A in the two devices. Observed beam-driven instabilities include toroidicity-induced Alfven eigenmodes (TAE). The stability threshold for the TAE is similar in the two devices. As expected theoretically, the most unstable toroidal mode number n is larger in DIII-D

Insulin degradation products from perfused rat kidney

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Duckworth, W.C.; Hamel, F.G.; Liepnieks, J.; Peavy, D.; Frank, B.; Rabkin, R.

1989-01-01

The kidney is a major site for insulin metabolism, but the enzymes involved and the products generated have not been established. To examine the products, we have perfused rat kidneys with insulin specifically iodinated on either the A14 or the B26 tyrosine. Labeled material from both the perfusate and kidney extract was examined by Sephadex G50 and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). In perfusate from a filtering kidney, 22% of the insulin-sized material was not intact insulin on HPLC. With the nonfiltering kidney, 10.6% was not intact insulin. Labeled material from HPLC was sulfitolyzed and reinjected on HPLC. By use of 125 I-iodo(A14)-insulin, almost all the degradation products contained an intact A-chain. By use of 125 I-iodo(B26)-insulin, several different B-chain-cleaved products were obtained. The material extracted from the perfused kidney was different from perfusate products but similar to intracellular products from hepatocytes, suggesting that cellular metabolism by kidney and liver are similar. The major intracellular product had characteristics consistent with a cleavage between the B16 and B17 amino acids. This product and several of the perfusate products are also produced by insulin protease suggesting that this enzyme is involved in the degradation of insulin by kidney

A Product Line Enhanced Unified Process

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Zhang, Weishan; Kunz, Thomas

2006-01-01

The Unified Process facilitates reuse for a single system, but falls short handling multiple similar products. In this paper we present an enhanced Unified Process, called UPEPL, integrating the product line technology in order to alleviate this problem. In UPEPL, the product line related activit...... activities are added and could be conducted side by side with other classical UP activities. In this way both the advantages of Unified Process and software product lines could co-exist in UPEPL. We show how to use UPEPL with an industrial mobile device product line in our case study....

[-25]A Similarity Analysis of Audio Signal to Develop a Human Activity Recognition Using Similarity Networks.

Science.gov (United States)

García-Hernández, Alejandra; Galván-Tejada, Carlos E; Galván-Tejada, Jorge I; Celaya-Padilla, José M; Gamboa-Rosales, Hamurabi; Velasco-Elizondo, Perla; Cárdenas-Vargas, Rogelio

2017-11-21

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is one of the main subjects of study in the areas of computer vision and machine learning due to the great benefits that can be achieved. Examples of the study areas are: health prevention, security and surveillance, automotive research, and many others. The proposed approaches are carried out using machine learning techniques and present good results. However, it is difficult to observe how the descriptors of human activities are grouped. In order to obtain a better understanding of the the behavior of descriptors, it is important to improve the abilities to recognize the human activities. This paper proposes a novel approach for the HAR based on acoustic data and similarity networks. In this approach, we were able to characterize the sound of the activities and identify those activities looking for similarity in the sound pattern. We evaluated the similarity of the sounds considering mainly two features: the sound location and the materials that were used. As a result, the materials are a good reference classifying the human activities compared with the location.

Resource use by two morphologically similar insectivorous bats ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Studies of morphologically dissimilar insectivorous bats have lead to the conclusion that morphology is the prime correlate of habitat use, and consequently of diet. This has lead to the prediction that morphologically similar bats should have similar diets. We examined the diet and morphology of two morphologically similar ...

Natural texture retrieval based on perceptual similarity measurement

Science.gov (United States)

Gao, Ying; Dong, Junyu; Lou, Jianwen; Qi, Lin; Liu, Jun

2018-04-01

A typical texture retrieval system performs feature comparison and might not be able to make human-like judgments of image similarity. Meanwhile, it is commonly known that perceptual texture similarity is difficult to be described by traditional image features. In this paper, we propose a new texture retrieval scheme based on texture perceptual similarity. The key of the proposed scheme is that prediction of perceptual similarity is performed by learning a non-linear mapping from image features space to perceptual texture space by using Random Forest. We test the method on natural texture dataset and apply it on a new wallpapers dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed texture retrieval scheme with perceptual similarity improves the retrieval performance over traditional image features.

7 CFR 51.2116 - Similar varietal characteristics.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... blanchable varieties within the “California” Marketing Classification. In addition, Nonpareil or similar... 7 Agriculture 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Similar varietal characteristics. 51.2116 Section 51.2116 Agriculture Regulations of the Department of Agriculture AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE (Standards...

7 CFR 51.1154 - Similar varietal characteristics.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Similar varietal characteristics. 51.1154 Section 51.1154 Agriculture Regulations of the Department of Agriculture AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE (Standards... varietal characteristics. Similar varietal characteristics means that the fruits in any container are...

Personality similarity in negotiations: Testing the dyadic effects of similarity in interpersonal traits and the use of emotional displays on negotiation outcomes.

Science.gov (United States)

Wilson, Kelly Schwind; DeRue, D Scott; Matta, Fadel K; Howe, Michael; Conlon, Donald E

2016-10-01

We build on the small but growing literature documenting personality influences on negotiation by examining how the joint disposition of both negotiators with respect to the interpersonal traits of agreeableness and extraversion influences important negotiation processes and outcomes. Building on similarity-attraction theory, we articulate and demonstrate how being similarly high or similarly low on agreeableness and extraversion leads dyad members to express more positive emotional displays during negotiation. Moreover, because of increased positive emotional displays, we show that dyads with such compositions also tend to reach agreements faster, perceive less relationship conflict, and have more positive impressions of their negotiation partner. Interestingly, these results hold regardless of whether negotiating dyads are similar in normatively positive (i.e., similarly agreeable and similarly extraverted) or normatively negative (i.e., similarly disagreeable and similarly introverted) ways. Overall, these findings demonstrate the importance of considering the dyad's personality configuration when attempting to understand the affective experience as well as the downstream outcomes of a negotiation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Do Tillage Methods Affect Germination and Species Similarity of Soil Weed Seeds Bank?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shahgholi Hassan

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Cultural practices such as tillage used for crop production influence the composition of the weed seed bank in the soil. In order to investigate the effects of different tillage methods on seed bank properties, species diversity and similarity, two laboratory and greenhouse experiments were carried out as randomized complete block design with four replications in 2011. Treatments included: once tillage per year (T1, twice tillage per year (T2, more than twice tillage (T3 and no tillage (T4. Laboratory results showed that the T3 and T4 treatments had the highest and the lowest observed seeds numbers, respectively. Between the laboratory observed weed seeds, the maximum weed seed numbers were Echinochloa crus-galli and Amaranthus retroflexus in the T3 treatment, while Chenopodium album, Polygonum aviculare and Cuscuta campestris had the highest seed numbers in the T2 treatment. At the greenhouse study, Chenopodium album, Amaranthus retroflexus and Hordeum morinum in the T2 treatment were dominant species. The highest diversity was observed in the T2 treatment, and Chenopodium album and Echinochloa crus-galli were dominant species in the T2 and T3 treatments. Maximum species similarity index was achieved from the T1 and T3 treatments. Thereby this study concluded that increasing of tillage number could affect the similarity index of weed seeds and subsequently alters the weed community composition.

Extended Producer Responsibility and Product Stewardship for Tobacco Product Waste.

Science.gov (United States)

Curtis, Clifton; Collins, Susan; Cunningham, Shea; Stigler, Paula; Novotny, Thomas E

2014-09-01

This paper reviews several environmental principles, including Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), Product Stewardship (PS), the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP), and the Precautionary Principle, as they may apply to tobacco product waste (TPW). The review addresses specific criteria that apply in deciding whether a particular toxic product should adhere to these principles; presents three case studies of similar approaches to other toxic and/or environmentally harmful products; and describes 10 possible interventions or policy actions that may help prevent, reduce, and mitigate the effects of TPW. EPR promotes total lifecycle environmental improvements, placing economic, physical, and informational responsibilities onto the tobacco industry, while PS complements EPR, but with responsibility shared by all parties involved in the tobacco product lifecycle. Both principles focus on toxic source reduction, post-consumer take-back, and final disposal of consumer products. These principles when applied to TPW have the potential to substantially decrease the environmental and public health harms of cigarette butts and other TPW throughout the world. TPW is the most commonly littered item picked up during environmental, urban, and coastal cleanups globally.

On distributional assumptions and whitened cosine similarities

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Loog, Marco

2008-01-01

Recently, an interpretation of the whitened cosine similarity measure as a Bayes decision rule was proposed (C. Liu, "The Bayes Decision Rule Induced Similarity Measures,'' IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 29, no. 6, pp. 1086-1090, June 2007. This communication makes th...

7 CFR 51.1550 - Similar varietal characteristics.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Similar varietal characteristics. 51.1550 Section 51.1550 Agriculture Regulations of the Department of Agriculture AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE (Standards... characteristics. Similar varietal characteristics means that the potatoes in any lot have the same general shape...

7 CFR 51.2756 - Similar varietal characteristics.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Similar varietal characteristics. 51.2756 Section 51.2756 Agriculture Regulations of the Department of Agriculture AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE (Standards... characteristics. Similar varietal characteristics means that the peanut kernels in the lot are not of distinctly...

7 CFR 51.2714 - Similar varietal characteristics.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Similar varietal characteristics. 51.2714 Section 51.2714 Agriculture Regulations of the Department of Agriculture AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE (Standards... characteristics. Similar varietal characteristics means that the peanut kernels in the lot are not of distinctly...

7 CFR 51.603 - Similar varietal characteristics.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Similar varietal characteristics. 51.603 Section 51.603 Agriculture Regulations of the Department of Agriculture AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE (Standards... characteristics. Similar varietal characteristics means that the stalks in any container have the same character...

Long-term delivery of protein therapeutics.

Science.gov (United States)

Vaishya, Ravi; Khurana, Varun; Patel, Sulabh; Mitra, Ashim K

2015-03-01

Proteins are effective biotherapeutics with applications in diverse ailments. Despite being specific and potent, their full clinical potential has not yet been realized. This can be attributed to short half-lives, complex structures, poor in vivo stability, low permeability, frequent parenteral administrations and poor adherence to treatment in chronic diseases. A sustained release system, providing controlled release of proteins, may overcome many of these limitations. This review focuses on recent development in approaches, especially polymer-based formulations, which can provide therapeutic levels of proteins over extended periods. Advances in particulate, gel-based formulations and novel approaches for extended protein delivery are discussed. Emphasis is placed on dosage form, method of preparation, mechanism of release and stability of biotherapeutics. Substantial advancements have been made in the field of extended protein delivery via various polymer-based formulations over last decade despite the unique delivery-related challenges posed by protein biologics. A number of injectable sustained-release formulations have reached market. However, therapeutic application of proteins is still hampered by delivery-related issues. A large number of protein molecules are under clinical trials, and hence, there is an urgent need to develop new methods to deliver these highly potent biologics.

Link-Based Similarity Measures Using Reachability Vectors

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Seok-Ho Yoon

2014-01-01

Full Text Available We present a novel approach for computing link-based similarities among objects accurately by utilizing the link information pertaining to the objects involved. We discuss the problems with previous link-based similarity measures and propose a novel approach for computing link based similarities that does not suffer from these problems. In the proposed approach each target object is represented by a vector. Each element of the vector corresponds to all the objects in the given data, and the value of each element denotes the weight for the corresponding object. As for this weight value, we propose to utilize the probability of reaching from the target object to the specific object, computed using the “Random Walk with Restart” strategy. Then, we define the similarity between two objects as the cosine similarity of the two vectors. In this paper, we provide examples to show that our approach does not suffer from the aforementioned problems. We also evaluate the performance of the proposed methods in comparison with existing link-based measures, qualitatively and quantitatively, with respect to two kinds of data sets, scientific papers and Web documents. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed methods significantly outperform the existing measures.

7 CFR 51.1906 - Similar varietal characteristics.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Similar varietal characteristics. 51.1906 Section 51.1906 Agriculture Regulations of the Department of Agriculture AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE (Standards... characteristics. Similar varietal characteristics means that the tomatoes are alike as to color, i.e., bright red...

Measuring structural similarity in large online networks.

Science.gov (United States)

Shi, Yongren; Macy, Michael

2016-09-01

Structural similarity based on bipartite graphs can be used to detect meaningful communities, but the networks have been tiny compared to massive online networks. Scalability is important in applications involving tens of millions of individuals with highly skewed degree distributions. Simulation analysis holding underlying similarity constant shows that two widely used measures - Jaccard index and cosine similarity - are biased by the distribution of out-degree in web-scale networks. However, an alternative measure, the Standardized Co-incident Ratio (SCR), is unbiased. We apply SCR to members of Congress, musical artists, and professional sports teams to show how massive co-following on Twitter can be used to map meaningful affiliations among cultural entities, even in the absence of direct connections to one another. Our results show how structural similarity can be used to map cultural alignments and demonstrate the potential usefulness of social media data in the study of culture, politics, and organizations across the social and behavioral sciences. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Outsourced similarity search on metric data assets

KAUST Repository

Yiu, Man Lung

2012-02-01

This paper considers a cloud computing setting in which similarity querying of metric data is outsourced to a service provider. The data is to be revealed only to trusted users, not to the service provider or anyone else. Users query the server for the most similar data objects to a query example. Outsourcing offers the data owner scalability and a low-initial investment. The need for privacy may be due to the data being sensitive (e.g., in medicine), valuable (e.g., in astronomy), or otherwise confidential. Given this setting, the paper presents techniques that transform the data prior to supplying it to the service provider for similarity queries on the transformed data. Our techniques provide interesting trade-offs between query cost and accuracy. They are then further extended to offer an intuitive privacy guarantee. Empirical studies with real data demonstrate that the techniques are capable of offering privacy while enabling efficient and accurate processing of similarity queries.

Prioritization of candidate disease genes by combining topological similarity and semantic similarity.

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Bin; Jin, Min; Zeng, Pan

2015-10-01

The identification of gene-phenotype relationships is very important for the treatment of human diseases. Studies have shown that genes causing the same or similar phenotypes tend to interact with each other in a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network. Thus, many identification methods based on the PPI network model have achieved good results. However, in the PPI network, some interactions between the proteins encoded by candidate gene and the proteins encoded by known disease genes are very weak. Therefore, some studies have combined the PPI network with other genomic information and reported good predictive performances. However, we believe that the results could be further improved. In this paper, we propose a new method that uses the semantic similarity between the candidate gene and known disease genes to set the initial probability vector of a random walk with a restart algorithm in a human PPI network. The effectiveness of our method was demonstrated by leave-one-out cross-validation, and the experimental results indicated that our method outperformed other methods. Additionally, our method can predict new causative genes of multifactor diseases, including Parkinson's disease, breast cancer and obesity. The top predictions were good and consistent with the findings in the literature, which further illustrates the effectiveness of our method. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Lagrangian-similarity diffusion-deposition model

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Horst, T.W.

1979-01-01

A Lagrangian-similarity diffusion model has been incorporated into the surface-depletion deposition model. This model predicts vertical concentration profiles far downwind of the source that agree with those of a one-dimensional gradient-transfer model

A little similarity goes a long way: the effects of peripheral but self-revealing similarities on improving and sustaining interracial relationships.

Science.gov (United States)

West, Tessa V; Magee, Joe C; Gordon, Sarah H; Gullett, Lindy

2014-07-01

Integrating theory on close relationships and intergroup relations, we construct a manipulation of similarity that we demonstrate can improve interracial interactions across different settings. We find that manipulating perceptions of similarity on self-revealing attributes that are peripheral to the interaction improves interactions in cross-race dyads and racially diverse task groups. In a getting-acquainted context, we demonstrate that the belief that one's different-race partner is similar to oneself on self-revealing, peripheral attributes leads to less anticipatory anxiety than the belief that one's partner is similar on peripheral, nonself-revealing attributes. In another dyadic context, we explore the range of benefits that perceptions of peripheral, self-revealing similarity can bring to different-race interaction partners and find (a) less anxiety during interaction, (b) greater interest in sustained contact with one's partner, and (c) stronger accuracy in perceptions of one's partners' relationship intentions. By contrast, participants in same-race interactions were largely unaffected by these manipulations of perceived similarity. Our final experiment shows that among small task groups composed of racially diverse individuals, those whose members perceive peripheral, self-revealing similarity perform superior to those who perceive dissimilarity. Implications for using this approach to improve interracial interactions across different goal-driven contexts are discussed.

Application of the principle of similarity fluid mechanics

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hendricks, R.C.; Sengers, J.V.

1979-01-01

Possible applications of the principle of similarity to fluid mechanics is described and illustrated. In correlating thermophysical properties of fluids, the similarity principle transcends the traditional corresponding states principle. In fluid mechanics the similarity principle is useful in correlating flow processes that can be modeled adequately with one independent variable (i.e., one-dimensional flows). In this paper we explore the concept of transforming the conservation equations by combining similarity principles for thermophysical properties with those for fluid flow. We illustrate the usefulness of the procedure by applying such a transformation to calculate two phase critical mass flow through a nozzle

A Survey of Binary Similarity and Distance Measures

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Seung-Seok Choi

2010-02-01

Full Text Available The binary feature vector is one of the most common representations of patterns and measuring similarity and distance measures play a critical role in many problems such as clustering, classification, etc. Ever since Jaccard proposed a similarity measure to classify ecological species in 1901, numerous binary similarity and distance measures have been proposed in various fields. Applying appropriate measures results in more accurate data analysis. Notwithstanding, few comprehensive surveys on binary measures have been conducted. Hence we collected 76 binary similarity and distance measures used over the last century and reveal their correlations through the hierarchical clustering technique.

A Similarity Search Using Molecular Topological Graphs

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yoshifumi Fukunishi

2009-01-01

Full Text Available A molecular similarity measure has been developed using molecular topological graphs and atomic partial charges. Two kinds of topological graphs were used. One is the ordinary adjacency matrix and the other is a matrix which represents the minimum path length between two atoms of the molecule. The ordinary adjacency matrix is suitable to compare the local structures of molecules such as functional groups, and the other matrix is suitable to compare the global structures of molecules. The combination of these two matrices gave a similarity measure. This method was applied to in silico drug screening, and the results showed that it was effective as a similarity measure.

Similarity of eigenstates in generalized labyrinth tilings

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Thiem, Stefanie; Schreiber, Michael

2010-01-01

The eigenstates of d-dimensional quasicrystalline models with a separable Hamiltonian are studied within the tight-binding model. The approach is based on mathematical sequences, constructed by an inflation rule P = {w → s,s → sws b-1 } describing the weak/strong couplings of atoms in a quasiperiodic chain. Higher-dimensional quasiperiodic tilings are constructed as a direct product of these chains and their eigenstates can be directly calculated by multiplying the energies E or wave functions ψ of the chain, respectively. Applying this construction rule, the grid in d dimensions splits into 2 d-1 different tilings, for which we investigated the characteristics of the wave functions. For the standard two-dimensional labyrinth tiling constructed from the octonacci sequence (b = 2) the lattice breaks up into two identical lattices, which consequently yield the same eigenstates. While this is not the case for b ≠ 2, our numerical results show that the wave functions of the different grids become increasingly similar for large system sizes. This can be explained by the fact that the structure of the 2 d-1 grids mainly differs at the boundaries and thus for large systems the eigenstates approach each other. This property allows us to analytically derive properties of the higher-dimensional generalized labyrinth tilings from the one-dimensional results. In particular participation numbers and corresponding scaling exponents have been determined.

Microbial characterization of probiotics–Advisory report of the Working Group “8651 Probiotics” of the Belgian Superior Health Council (SHC)

Science.gov (United States)

Huys, Geert; Botteldoorn, Nadine; Delvigne, Frank; Vuyst, Luc De; Heyndrickx, Marc; Pot, Bruno; Dubois, Jean-Jacques; Daube, Georges

2013-01-01

When ingested in sufficient numbers, probiotics are expected to confer one or more proven health benefits on the consumer. Theoretically, the effectiveness of a probiotic food product is the sum of its microbial quality and its functional potential. Whereas the latter may vary much with the body (target) site, delivery mode, human target population, and health benefit envisaged microbial assessment of the probiotic product quality is more straightforward. The range of stakeholders that need to be informed on probiotic quality assessments is extremely broad, including academics, food and biotherapeutic industries, healthcare professionals, competent authorities, consumers, and professional press. In view of the rapidly expanding knowledge on this subject, the Belgian Superior Health Council installed Working Group “8651 Probiotics” to review the state of knowledge regarding the methodologies that make it possible to characterize strains and products with purported probiotic activity. This advisory report covers three main steps in the microbial quality assessment process, i.e. (i) correct species identification and strain-specific typing of bacterial and yeast strains used in probiotic applications, (ii) safety assessment of probiotic strains used for human consumption, and (iii) quality of the final probiotic product in terms of its microbial composition, concentration, stability, authenticity, and labeling. PMID:23801655

Preparing for a Product Platform

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Fiil-Nielsen, Ole; Munk, Lone; Mortensen, Niels Henrik

2005-01-01

on commonalities and similarities in the product family, and variance should be based on customer demands. To relate these terms and to improve the basis on which decisions are made, we need a way of visualizing the hierarchy of the product family as well as the commonality and variance. This visualization method...... of the platform or ensuring that the platform can meet future demands will be very useful in the preparation process of a platform synthesis as well as in the updating or reengineering of an existing product development platform.......Experience in the industry as well as recent related scientific publications show the benefits of product development platforms. Companies use platforms to develop not a single but multiple products (i.e. a product family) simultaneously. When these product development projects are coordinated...

Sustainable evolution of product line infrastructure code

OpenAIRE

Patzke, T.

2011-01-01

A major goal in many software development organizations today is to reduce development effort and cost, while improving their products' quality and diversity by developing reusable software. An organization takes advantage of its products' similarities, exploits what they have in common and manages what varies among them by building a product line infrastructure. A product line infrastructure is a reuse repository that contains exactly those common and variable artifacts, such as requirements...

Similarity joins in relational database systems

CERN Document Server

Augsten, Nikolaus

2013-01-01

State-of-the-art database systems manage and process a variety of complex objects, including strings and trees. For such objects equality comparisons are often not meaningful and must be replaced by similarity comparisons. This book describes the concepts and techniques to incorporate similarity into database systems. We start out by discussing the properties of strings and trees, and identify the edit distance as the de facto standard for comparing complex objects. Since the edit distance is computationally expensive, token-based distances have been introduced to speed up edit distance comput

Mining Diagnostic Assessment Data for Concept Similarity

Science.gov (United States)

Madhyastha, Tara; Hunt, Earl

2009-01-01

This paper introduces a method for mining multiple-choice assessment data for similarity of the concepts represented by the multiple choice responses. The resulting similarity matrix can be used to visualize the distance between concepts in a lower-dimensional space. This gives an instructor a visualization of the relative difficulty of concepts…

Distributional Similarity for Chinese: Exploiting Characters and Radicals

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Peng Jin

2012-01-01

Full Text Available Distributional Similarity has attracted considerable attention in the field of natural language processing as an automatic means of countering the ubiquitous problem of sparse data. As a logographic language, Chinese words consist of characters and each of them is composed of one or more radicals. The meanings of characters are usually highly related to the words which contain them. Likewise, radicals often make a predictable contribution to the meaning of a character: characters that have the same components tend to have similar or related meanings. In this paper, we utilize these properties of the Chinese language to improve Chinese word similarity computation. Given a content word, we first extract similar words based on a large corpus and a similarity score for ranking. This rank is then adjusted according to the characters and components shared between the similar word and the target word. Experiments on two gold standard datasets show that the adjusted rank is superior and closer to human judgments than the original rank. In addition to quantitative evaluation, we examine the reasons behind errors drawing on linguistic phenomena for our explanations.

Phishing Detection: Analysis of Visual Similarity Based Approaches

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ankit Kumar Jain

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Phishing is one of the major problems faced by cyber-world and leads to financial losses for both industries and individuals. Detection of phishing attack with high accuracy has always been a challenging issue. At present, visual similarities based techniques are very useful for detecting phishing websites efficiently. Phishing website looks very similar in appearance to its corresponding legitimate website to deceive users into believing that they are browsing the correct website. Visual similarity based phishing detection techniques utilise the feature set like text content, text format, HTML tags, Cascading Style Sheet (CSS, image, and so forth, to make the decision. These approaches compare the suspicious website with the corresponding legitimate website by using various features and if the similarity is greater than the predefined threshold value then it is declared phishing. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of phishing attacks, their exploitation, some of the recent visual similarity based approaches for phishing detection, and its comparative study. Our survey provides a better understanding of the problem, current solution space, and scope of future research to deal with phishing attacks efficiently using visual similarity based approaches.

Cultural similarity, cultural competence, and nurse workforce diversity.

Science.gov (United States)

McGinnis, Sandra L; Brush, Barbara L; Moore, Jean

2010-11-01

Proponents of health workforce diversity argue that increasing the number of minority health care providers will enhance cultural similarity between patients and providers as well as the health system's capacity to provide culturally competent care. Measuring cultural similarity has been difficult, however, given that current benchmarks of workforce diversity categorize health workers by major racial/ethnic classifications rather than by cultural measures. This study examined the use of national racial/ethnic categories in both patient and registered nurse (RN) populations and found them to be a poor indicator of cultural similarity. Rather, we found that cultural similarity between RN and patient populations needs to be established at the level of local labor markets and broadened to include other cultural parameters such as country of origin, primary language, and self-identified ancestry. Only then can the relationship between cultural similarity and cultural competence be accurately determined and its outcomes measured.

Applying CBR to machine tool product configuration design oriented to customer requirements

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Pengjia; Gong, Yadong; Xie, Hualong; Liu, Yongxian; Nee, Andrew Yehching

2017-01-01

Product customization is a trend in the current market-oriented manufacturing environment. However, deduction from customer requirements to design results and evaluation of design alternatives are still heavily reliant on the designer's experience and knowledge. To solve the problem of fuzziness and uncertainty of customer requirements in product configuration, an analysis method based on the grey rough model is presented. The customer requirements can be converted into technical characteristics effectively. In addition, an optimization decision model for product planning is established to help the enterprises select the key technical characteristics under the constraints of cost and time to serve the customer to maximal satisfaction. A new case retrieval approach that combines the self-organizing map and fuzzy similarity priority ratio method is proposed in case-based design. The self-organizing map can reduce the retrieval range and increase the retrieval efficiency, and the fuzzy similarity priority ratio method can evaluate the similarity of cases comprehensively. To ensure that the final case has the best overall performance, an evaluation method of similar cases based on grey correlation analysis is proposed to evaluate similar cases to select the most suitable case. Furthermore, a computer-aided system is developed using MATLAB GUI to assist the product configuration design. The actual example and result on an ETC series machine tool product show that the proposed method is effective, rapid and accurate in the process of product configuration. The proposed methodology provides a detailed instruction for the product configuration design oriented to customer requirements.

On Self-Similarity of Top Production at Tevatron

Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

Tokarev, M. V.; Zborovský, Imrich

2012-01-01

Roč. 3, č. 8 (2012), s. 815-820 ISSN 2153-120X R&D Projects: GA MŠk LA08002; GA MŠk LA08015 Institutional research plan: CEZ:AV0Z10480505 Keywords : top quark * Tevatron Subject RIV: BE - Theoretical Physics http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=21690

Self-similar gravitational clustering

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Efstathiou, G.; Fall, S.M.; Hogan, C.

1979-01-01

The evolution of gravitational clustering is considered and several new scaling relations are derived for the multiplicity function. These include generalizations of the Press-Schechter theory to different densities and cosmological parameters. The theory is then tested against multiplicity function and correlation function estimates for a series of 1000-body experiments. The results are consistent with the theory and show some dependence on initial conditions and cosmological density parameter. The statistical significance of the results, however, is fairly low because of several small number effects in the experiments. There is no evidence for a non-linear bootstrap effect or a dependence of the multiplicity function on the internal dynamics of condensed groups. Empirical estimates of the multiplicity function by Gott and Turner have a feature near the characteristic luminosity predicted by the theory. The scaling relations allow the inference from estimates of the galaxy luminosity function that galaxies must have suffered considerable dissipation if they originally formed from a self-similar hierarchy. A method is also developed for relating the multiplicity function to similar measures of clustering, such as those of Bhavsar, for the distribution of galaxies on the sky. These are shown to depend on the luminosity function in a complicated way. (author)

A New Trajectory Similarity Measure for GPS Data

KAUST Repository

Ismail, Anas; Vigneron, Antoine E.

2016-01-01

We present a new algorithm for measuring the similarity between trajectories, and in particular between GPS traces. We call this new similarity measure the Merge Distance (MD). Our approach is robust against subsampling and supersampling. We perform experiments to compare this new similarity measure with the two main approaches that have been used so far: Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and the Euclidean distance. © 2015 ACM.

A New Trajectory Similarity Measure for GPS Data

KAUST Repository

Ismail, Anas

2016-08-08

We present a new algorithm for measuring the similarity between trajectories, and in particular between GPS traces. We call this new similarity measure the Merge Distance (MD). Our approach is robust against subsampling and supersampling. We perform experiments to compare this new similarity measure with the two main approaches that have been used so far: Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and the Euclidean distance. © 2015 ACM.

Lipschitz equivalence of self-similar sets with touching structures

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ruan, Huo-Jun; Wang, Yang; Xi, Li-Feng

2014-01-01

Lipschitz equivalence of self-similar sets is an important area in the study of fractal geometry. It is known that two dust-like self-similar sets with the same contraction ratios are always Lipschitz equivalent. However, when self-similar sets have touching structures the problem of Lipschitz equivalence becomes much more challenging and intriguing at the same time. So far, all the known results only cover self-similar sets in R with no more than three branches. In this study we establish results for the Lipschitz equivalence of self-similar sets with touching structures in R with arbitrarily many branches. Key to our study is the introduction of a geometric condition for self-similar sets called substitutable. (paper)

Common neighbour structure and similarity intensity in complex networks

Science.gov (United States)

Hou, Lei; Liu, Kecheng

2017-10-01

Complex systems as networks always exhibit strong regularities, implying underlying mechanisms governing their evolution. In addition to the degree preference, the similarity has been argued to be another driver for networks. Assuming a network is randomly organised without similarity preference, the present paper studies the expected number of common neighbours between vertices. A symmetrical similarity index is accordingly developed by removing such expected number from the observed common neighbours. The developed index can not only describe the similarities between vertices, but also the dissimilarities. We further apply the proposed index to measure of the influence of similarity on the wring patterns of networks. Fifteen empirical networks as well as artificial networks are examined in terms of similarity intensity and degree heterogeneity. Results on real networks indicate that, social networks are strongly governed by the similarity as well as the degree preference, while the biological networks and infrastructure networks show no apparent similarity governance. Particularly, classical network models, such as the Barabási-Albert model, the Erdös-Rényi model and the Ring Lattice, cannot well describe the social networks in terms of the degree heterogeneity and similarity intensity. The findings may shed some light on the modelling and link prediction of different classes of networks.

Self-similar potential in the near wake

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Diebold, D.; Hershkowitz, N.; Intrator, T.; Bailey, A.

1987-01-01

The plasma potential is measured near the edge of an electrically floating obstacle placed in a steady-state, supersonic, unmagnetized, neutral plasma flow. Equipotential contours show the sheath of the upstream side of the obstacle wrapping around the edge of the obstacle and fanning out into the near wake. Both fluid theory and the data find the near-wake plasma potential to be self-similar when ionization, charge exchange, and magnetic field can be neglected. The theory also finds that fluid velocity is self-similar, the near wake is nonneutral, and plasma density is not self-similar. Strong electric fields are found near the obstacle and equipotential contours are found to conform to all boundaries

Multiscale Hybrid Nonlocal Means Filtering Using Modified Similarity Measure

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zahid Hussain Shamsi

2015-01-01

Full Text Available A new multiscale implementation of nonlocal means filtering (MHNLM for image denoising is proposed. The proposed algorithm also introduces a modification of the similarity measure for patch comparison. Assuming the patch as an oriented surface, the notion of a normal vectors patch is introduced. The inner product of these normal vectors patches is defined and then used in the weighted Euclidean distance of intensity patches as the weight factor. The algorithm involves two steps: the first step is a multiscale implementation of an accelerated nonlocal means filtering in the discrete stationary wavelet domain to obtain a refined version of the noisy patches for later comparison. The next step is to apply the proposed modification of standard nonlocal means filtering to the noisy image using the reference patches obtained in the first step. These refined patches contain less noise, and consequently the computation of normal vectors and partial derivatives is more precise. Experimental results show equivalent or better performance of the proposed algorithm compared to various state-of-the-art algorithms.

Transverse polarization in γZ, HZ production

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

In the case of production, this observable can be used to probe a certain effective four-point + - CP-violating coupling, not accessible without TP. Effective CP-violating coupling does not contribute to this observable. A similar observable in production can be used to probe + - four-point ...

Improved collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm of similarity measure

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Baofu; Yuan, Baoping

2017-05-01

The Collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm is one of the most widely used recommendation algorithm in personalized recommender systems. The key is to find the nearest neighbor set of the active user by using similarity measure. However, the methods of traditional similarity measure mainly focus on the similarity of user common rating items, but ignore the relationship between the user common rating items and all items the user rates. And because rating matrix is very sparse, traditional collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm is not high efficiency. In order to obtain better accuracy, based on the consideration of common preference between users, the difference of rating scale and score of common items, this paper presents an improved similarity measure method, and based on this method, a collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm based on similarity improvement is proposed. Experimental results show that the algorithm can effectively improve the quality of recommendation, thus alleviate the impact of data sparseness.

Protein structure similarity from principle component correlation analysis

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Chou James

2006-01-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Owing to rapid expansion of protein structure databases in recent years, methods of structure comparison are becoming increasingly effective and important in revealing novel information on functional properties of proteins and their roles in the grand scheme of evolutionary biology. Currently, the structural similarity between two proteins is measured by the root-mean-square-deviation (RMSD in their best-superimposed atomic coordinates. RMSD is the golden rule of measuring structural similarity when the structures are nearly identical; it, however, fails to detect the higher order topological similarities in proteins evolved into different shapes. We propose new algorithms for extracting geometrical invariants of proteins that can be effectively used to identify homologous protein structures or topologies in order to quantify both close and remote structural similarities. Results We measure structural similarity between proteins by correlating the principle components of their secondary structure interaction matrix. In our approach, the Principle Component Correlation (PCC analysis, a symmetric interaction matrix for a protein structure is constructed with relationship parameters between secondary elements that can take the form of distance, orientation, or other relevant structural invariants. When using a distance-based construction in the presence or absence of encoded N to C terminal sense, there are strong correlations between the principle components of interaction matrices of structurally or topologically similar proteins. Conclusion The PCC method is extensively tested for protein structures that belong to the same topological class but are significantly different by RMSD measure. The PCC analysis can also differentiate proteins having similar shapes but different topological arrangements. Additionally, we demonstrate that when using two independently defined interaction matrices, comparison of their maximum

Structural similarity and category-specificity

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Gerlach, Christian; Law, Ian; Paulson, Olaf B

2004-01-01

It has been suggested that category-specific recognition disorders for natural objects may reflect that natural objects are more structurally (visually) similar than artefacts and therefore more difficult to recognize following brain damage. On this account one might expect a positive relationshi...

Technology, labor characteristics and wage-productivity gaps

OpenAIRE

Ilmakunnas, Pekka; Maliranta, Mika

2003-01-01

We use plant-level linked employer-employee data from Finland to estimate production functions where also employee characteristics (average age and education, and sex composition) are included. We also estimate similar models for wages to examine whether wages are based on productivity. Our aim is to explain productivity besides manufacturing, also in services. For the service sector plants, no data on capital input, working hours, or value added is available, and productivity has to be measu...

Optimal Synthetic Glycosylation of a Therapeutic Antibody.

Science.gov (United States)

Parsons, Thomas B; Struwe, Weston B; Gault, Joseph; Yamamoto, Keisuke; Taylor, Thomas A; Raj, Ritu; Wals, Kim; Mohammed, Shabaz; Robinson, Carol V; Benesch, Justin L P; Davis, Benjamin G

2016-02-12

Glycosylation patterns in antibodies critically determine biological and physical properties but their precise control is a significant challenge in biology and biotechnology. We describe herein the optimization of an endoglycosidase-catalyzed glycosylation of the best-selling biotherapeutic Herceptin, an anti-HER2 antibody. Precise MS analysis of the intact four-chain Ab heteromultimer reveals nonspecific, non-enzymatic reactions (glycation), which are not detected under standard denaturing conditions. This competing reaction, which has hitherto been underestimated as a source of side products, can now be minimized. Optimization allowed access to the purest natural form of Herceptin to date (≥90 %). Moreover, through the use of a small library of sugars containing non-natural functional groups, Ab variants containing defined numbers of selectively addressable chemical tags (reaction handles at Sia C1) in specific positions (for attachment of cargo molecules or "glycorandomization") were readily generated.

Microencapsulation for the Therapeutic Delivery of Drugs, Live Mammalian and Bacterial Cells, and Other Biopharmaceutics: Current Status and Future Directions

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Catherine Tomaro-Duchesneau

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Microencapsulation is a technology that has shown significant promise in biotherapeutics, and other applications. It has been proven useful in the immobilization of drugs, live mammalian and bacterial cells and other cells, and other biopharmaceutics molecules, as it can provide material structuration, protection of the enclosed product, and controlled release of the encapsulated contents, all of which can ensure efficient and safe therapeutic effects. This paper is a comprehensive review of microencapsulation and its latest developments in the field. It provides a comprehensive overview of the technology and primary goals of microencapsulation and discusses various processes and techniques involved in microencapsulation including physical, chemical, physicochemical, and other methods involved. It also summarizes the state-of-the-art successes of microencapsulation, specifically with regard to the encapsulation of microorganisms, mammalian cells, drugs, and other biopharmaceutics in various diseases. The limitations and future directions of microencapsulation technologies are also discussed.

Microencapsulation for the Therapeutic Delivery of Drugs, Live Mammalian and Bacterial Cells, and Other Biopharmaceutics: Current Status and Future Directions

Science.gov (United States)

Saha, Shyamali; Malhotra, Meenakshi; Kahouli, Imen; Prakash, Satya

2013-01-01

Microencapsulation is a technology that has shown significant promise in biotherapeutics, and other applications. It has been proven useful in the immobilization of drugs, live mammalian and bacterial cells and other cells, and other biopharmaceutics molecules, as it can provide material structuration, protection of the enclosed product, and controlled release of the encapsulated contents, all of which can ensure efficient and safe therapeutic effects. This paper is a comprehensive review of microencapsulation and its latest developments in the field. It provides a comprehensive overview of the technology and primary goals of microencapsulation and discusses various processes and techniques involved in microencapsulation including physical, chemical, physicochemical, and other methods involved. It also summarizes the state-of-the-art successes of microencapsulation, specifically with regard to the encapsulation of microorganisms, mammalian cells, drugs, and other biopharmaceutics in various diseases. The limitations and future directions of microencapsulation technologies are also discussed. PMID:26555963

The polarised Λ production in QCD

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ravindran, V.

1997-01-01

The Q 2 evolution of polarised parton fragmentation functions is discussed using the Altarelli-Parisi evolution equations. The first moments of both the polarised quark and gluon fragmentation functions are shown to behave in a similar fashion at very high energies. This analysis is applicable to any hard processes involving the production of polarised hadrons. The polarised Λ hyperon production in e + e - annihilation where this can be realised is considered. We present complete α s (Q 2 ) corrections to the asymmetries discussed in the paper of Burkardt and Jaffe which demonstrates the extraction of various polarised fragmentation functions. To this order, these corrections are found to be scheme dependent similar to that of structure functions. (orig.)

New Trend on Halva Production: Dietetic Halva and Nougat. Production Technology and Compositions

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Emil Racolta

2013-11-01

Full Text Available In the last years sugar free confectionery market had grown steadily. This types of products are primarily addressed to diabetics and dieters, but the main driving factor of their growth is the increase of the obese population who raised concern about their health. Halva is known as a high caloric product with its nutritional energy higher than 500 kcal/100g, the demand of a sugar free version for this confectionery products group being those a current need. This work aimed to develop new products – dietetic halva and nougat, their production technology and compositions being in detail described. A new trend on halva production was established by developing a dietetic halva and nougat. The problem which is solved by the current work is to assure a proper technology in order to obtain a dietetic halva similar in taste and texture with the conventional one.

Considerations of critical quality attributes in the analytical comparability assessment of biosimilar products.

Science.gov (United States)

Kwon, Ohseok; Joung, Jeewon; Park, Younjoo; Kim, Chan Wha; Hong, Seung Hwa

2017-07-01

Based on experience in clinical trial approvals and marketing authorizations for biosimilar products in Korea, we suggest principles for the analytical comparability assessment of biosimilar products with respect to regulatory considerations. The composition and manufacturing processes of biosimilar products can differ from those of the reference product depending on the information available for the reference product and the time of product development; however, the analytical characteristics of biosimilar products should be highly similar to those of the reference product. Although manufacturing an identical product in terms of the quality profile is nearly impossible due to the high molecular weight and complex structure of biological products, the developer of the biosimilar product should attempt to establish a quality level as similar to that of the reference product as possible. When comparing the similarity of quality attributes, the criticality of the quality attributes and the characteristics of orthogonal quality attributes need to be considered carefully. Based on the results from the analytical comparability assessment, the comparability results of non-clinical and clinical studies should be evaluated before claiming biosimilarity to the reference product. In this review, we focus on quality attribute evaluation based on our regulatory experience. Copyright © 2017 International Alliance for Biological Standardization. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Green development within Product families

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Lenau, Torben Anker; Willum, Ole; Frees, Niels

2000-01-01

occur, and uncover where the improvement potentials are in the product. The environmental knowledge obtained in this context will be valid for a number of years, and both the producer and other interested parties can use this information for setting priorities in their future planning. However, it can...... be very time consuming to perform an environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), and it would be an advantage if a number of similar products - product families - could be handled in one and the same LCA as a whole. The project has presently developed a method for selecting and forming product families......From 1991 to 1996 the EDIP-methodology (Environmental Design of Industrial Products) was developed. One experience from the EDIP-project is that environmental assessment of products must give simple and operational conclusions, which can be acknowledged in the product development and by other...

A Minimum Spanning Tree Representation of Anime Similarities

OpenAIRE

Wibowo, Canggih Puspo

2016-01-01

In this work, a new way to represent Japanese animation (anime) is presented. We applied a minimum spanning tree to show the relation between anime. The distance between anime is calculated through three similarity measurements, namely crew, score histogram, and topic similarities. Finally, the centralities are also computed to reveal the most significance anime. The result shows that the minimum spanning tree can be used to determine the similarity anime. Furthermore, by using centralities c...

Improved cosine similarity measures of simplified neutrosophic setsfor medical diagnoses

OpenAIRE

Jun Ye

2014-01-01

In pattern recognition and medical diagnosis, similarity measure is an important mathematicaltool. To overcome some disadvantages of existing cosine similarity measures of simplified neutrosophicsets (SNSs) in vector space, this paper proposed improved cosine similarity measures of SNSs based oncosine function, including single valued neutrosophic cosine similarity measures and interval neutro-sophic cosine similarity measures. Then, weighted cosine similarity measures of SNSs were introduced...

Similarity search processing. Paralelization and indexing technologies.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Eder Dos Santos

2015-08-01

The next Scientific-Technical Report addresses the similarity search and the implementation of metric structures on parallel environments. It also presents the state of the art related to similarity search on metric structures and parallelism technologies. Comparative analysis are also proposed, seeking to identify the behavior of a set of metric spaces and metric structures over processing platforms multicore-based and GPU-based.

Phonological similarity in working memory span tasks.

Science.gov (United States)

Chow, Michael; Macnamara, Brooke N; Conway, Andrew R A

2016-08-01

In a series of four experiments, we explored what conditions are sufficient to produce a phonological similarity facilitation effect in working memory span tasks. By using the same set of memoranda, but differing the secondary-task requirements across experiments, we showed that a phonological similarity facilitation effect is dependent upon the semantic relationship between the memoranda and the secondary-task stimuli, and is robust to changes in the representation, ordering, and pool size of the secondary-task stimuli. These findings are consistent with interference accounts of memory (Brown, Neath, & Chater, Psychological Review, 114, 539-576, 2007; Oberauer, Lewandowsky, Farrell, Jarrold, & Greaves, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 19, 779-819, 2012), whereby rhyming stimuli provide a form of categorical similarity that allows distractors to be excluded from retrieval at recall.

PHOG analysis of self-similarity in aesthetic images

Science.gov (United States)

Amirshahi, Seyed Ali; Koch, Michael; Denzler, Joachim; Redies, Christoph

2012-03-01

In recent years, there have been efforts in defining the statistical properties of aesthetic photographs and artworks using computer vision techniques. However, it is still an open question how to distinguish aesthetic from non-aesthetic images with a high recognition rate. This is possibly because aesthetic perception is influenced also by a large number of cultural variables. Nevertheless, the search for statistical properties of aesthetic images has not been futile. For example, we have shown that the radially averaged power spectrum of monochrome artworks of Western and Eastern provenance falls off according to a power law with increasing spatial frequency (1/f2 characteristics). This finding implies that this particular subset of artworks possesses a Fourier power spectrum that is self-similar across different scales of spatial resolution. Other types of aesthetic images, such as cartoons, comics and mangas also display this type of self-similarity, as do photographs of complex natural scenes. Since the human visual system is adapted to encode images of natural scenes in a particular efficient way, we have argued that artists imitate these statistics in their artworks. In support of this notion, we presented results that artists portrait human faces with the self-similar Fourier statistics of complex natural scenes although real-world photographs of faces are not self-similar. In view of these previous findings, we investigated other statistical measures of self-similarity to characterize aesthetic and non-aesthetic images. In the present work, we propose a novel measure of self-similarity that is based on the Pyramid Histogram of Oriented Gradients (PHOG). For every image, we first calculate PHOG up to pyramid level 3. The similarity between the histograms of each section at a particular level is then calculated to the parent section at the previous level (or to the histogram at the ground level). The proposed approach is tested on datasets of aesthetic and

Evaluating gender similarities and differences using metasynthesis.

Science.gov (United States)

Zell, Ethan; Krizan, Zlatan; Teeter, Sabrina R

2015-01-01

Despite the common lay assumption that males and females are profoundly different, Hyde (2005) used data from 46 meta-analyses to demonstrate that males and females are highly similar. Nonetheless, the gender similarities hypothesis has remained controversial. Since Hyde's provocative report, there has been an explosion of meta-analytic interest in psychological gender differences. We utilized this enormous collection of 106 meta-analyses and 386 individual meta-analytic effects to reevaluate the gender similarities hypothesis. Furthermore, we employed a novel data-analytic approach called metasynthesis (Zell & Krizan, 2014) to estimate the average difference between males and females and to explore moderators of gender differences. The average, absolute difference between males and females across domains was relatively small (d = 0.21, SD = 0.14), with the majority of effects being either small (46%) or very small (39%). Magnitude of differences fluctuated somewhat as a function of the psychological domain (e.g., cognitive variables, social and personality variables, well-being), but remained largely constant across age, culture, and generations. These findings provide compelling support for the gender similarities hypothesis, but also underscore conditions under which gender differences are most pronounced. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved.

Fast business process similarity search

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Yan, Z.; Dijkman, R.M.; Grefen, P.W.P.J.

2012-01-01

Nowadays, it is common for organizations to maintain collections of hundreds or even thousands of business processes. Techniques exist to search through such a collection, for business process models that are similar to a given query model. However, those techniques compare the query model to each

Stochastic self-similar and fractal universe

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Iovane, G.; Laserra, E.; Tortoriello, F.S.

2004-01-01

The structures formation of the Universe appears as if it were a classically self-similar random process at all astrophysical scales. An agreement is demonstrated for the present hypotheses of segregation with a size of astrophysical structures by using a comparison between quantum quantities and astrophysical ones. We present the observed segregated Universe as the result of a fundamental self-similar law, which generalizes the Compton wavelength relation. It appears that the Universe has a memory of its quantum origin as suggested by R. Penrose with respect to quasi-crystal. A more accurate analysis shows that the present theory can be extended from the astrophysical to the nuclear scale by using generalized (stochastically) self-similar random process. This transition is connected to the relevant presence of the electromagnetic and nuclear interactions inside the matter. In this sense, the presented rule is correct from a subatomic scale to an astrophysical one. We discuss the near full agreement at organic cell scale and human scale too. Consequently the Universe, with its structures at all scales (atomic nucleus, organic cell, human, planet, solar system, galaxy, clusters of galaxy, super clusters of galaxy), could have a fundamental quantum reason. In conclusion, we analyze the spatial dimensions of the objects in the Universe as well as space-time dimensions. The result is that it seems we live in an El Naschie's E-infinity Cantorian space-time; so we must seriously start considering fractal geometry as the geometry of nature, a type of arena where the laws of physics appear at each scale in a self-similar way as advocated long ago by the Swedish school of astrophysics

New similarity of triangular fuzzy number and its application.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Xixiang; Ma, Weimin; Chen, Liping

2014-01-01

The similarity of triangular fuzzy numbers is an important metric for application of it. There exist several approaches to measure similarity of triangular fuzzy numbers. However, some of them are opt to be large. To make the similarity well distributed, a new method SIAM (Shape's Indifferent Area and Midpoint) to measure triangular fuzzy number is put forward, which takes the shape's indifferent area and midpoint of two triangular fuzzy numbers into consideration. Comparison with other similarity measurements shows the effectiveness of the proposed method. Then, it is applied to collaborative filtering recommendation to measure users' similarity. A collaborative filtering case is used to illustrate users' similarity based on cloud model and triangular fuzzy number; the result indicates that users' similarity based on triangular fuzzy number can obtain better discrimination. Finally, a simulated collaborative filtering recommendation system is developed which uses cloud model and triangular fuzzy number to express users' comprehensive evaluation on items, and result shows that the accuracy of collaborative filtering recommendation based on triangular fuzzy number is higher.

9 CFR 319.105 - “Ham patties,” “Chopped ham,” “Pressed ham,” “Spiced ham,” and similar products.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... MEAT AND POULTRY PRODUCTS INSPECTION AND VOLUNTARY INSPECTION AND CERTIFICATION DEFINITIONS AND STANDARDS OF IDENTITY OR COMPOSITION Cured Meats, Unsmoked and Smoked § 319.105 “Ham patties,” “Chopped ham... of cured pork product Minimum meat PFF percentage 1 Product name and qualifying statements “Ham...

A statistical analysis of product prices in online markets

Science.gov (United States)

Mizuno, T.; Watanabe, T.

2010-08-01

We empirically investigate fluctuations in product prices in online markets by using a tick-by-tick price data collected from a Japanese price comparison site, and find some similarities and differences between product and asset prices. The average price of a product across e-retailers behaves almost like a random walk, although the probability of price increase/decrease is higher conditional on the multiple events of price increase/decrease. This is quite similar to the property reported by previous studies about asset prices. However, we fail to find a long memory property in the volatility of product price changes. Also, we find that the price change distribution for product prices is close to an exponential distribution, rather than a power law distribution. These two findings are in a sharp contrast with the previous results regarding asset prices. We propose an interpretation that these differences may stem from the absence of speculative activities in product markets; namely, e-retailers seldom repeat buy and sell of a product, unlike traders in asset markets.

Measure of Node Similarity in Multilayer Networks

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Møllgaard, Anders; Zettler, Ingo; Dammeyer, Jesper

2016-01-01

The weight of links in a network is often related to the similarity of thenodes. Here, we introduce a simple tunable measure for analysing the similarityof nodes across different link weights. In particular, we use the measure toanalyze homophily in a group of 659 freshman students at a large...... university.Our analysis is based on data obtained using smartphones equipped with customdata collection software, complemented by questionnaire-based data. The networkof social contacts is represented as a weighted multilayer network constructedfrom different channels of telecommunication as well as data...... might bepresent in one layer of the multilayer network and simultaneously be absent inthe other layers. For a variable such as gender, our measure reveals atransition from similarity between nodes connected with links of relatively lowweight to dis-similarity for the nodes connected by the strongest...

Unveiling Music Structure Via PLSA Similarity Fusion

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Arenas-García, Jerónimo; Meng, Anders; Petersen, Kaare Brandt

2007-01-01

Nowadays there is an increasing interest in developing methods for building music recommendation systems. In order to get a satisfactory performance from such a system, one needs to incorporate as much information about songs similarity as possible; however, how to do so is not obvious. In this p......Nowadays there is an increasing interest in developing methods for building music recommendation systems. In order to get a satisfactory performance from such a system, one needs to incorporate as much information about songs similarity as possible; however, how to do so is not obvious...... observed similarities can be satisfactorily explained using the latent semantics. Additionally, this approach significantly simplifies the song retrieval phase, leading to a more practical system implementation. The suitability of the PLSA model for representing music structure is studied in a simplified...

Electricity economics. Production functions with electricity

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Hu, Zhaoguang [State Grid Energy Research Institute, Beijing (China); Hu, Zheng [Delaware Univ., Newark, DE (United States)

2013-07-01

The first book studies on the economics of electricity consumption. Compares the sector production functions with electricity and the commercial production functions with electricity. Introduces the global E-GDP function, the European E-GDP function and 12 national E-GDP functions. Presents the gene characters of EAI production functions and E-GDP functions for USA to see why USA's economy is entering an up-industrialization period. Discusses China's economic growth by production functions with electricity. Electricity Economics: Production Functions with Electricity studies the production output from analyzing patterns of electricity consumption. Since electricity data can be used to measure scenarios of economic performance due to its accuracy and reliability, it could therefore also be used to help scholars explore new research frontiers that directly and indirectly benefits human society. Our research initially explores a similar pattern to substitute the Cobb-Douglas function with the production function with electricity to track and forecast economic activities. The book systematically introduces the theoretical frameworks and mathematical models of economics from the perspective of electricity consumption. The E-GDP functions are presented for case studies of more than 20 developed and developing countries. These functions also demonstrate substantial similarities between human DNA and production functions with electricity in terms of four major characteristics, namely replication, mutation, uniqueness, and evolution. Furthermore, the book includes extensive data and case studies on the U.S., China, Japan, etc. It is intended for scientists, engineers, financial professionals, policy makers, consultants, and anyone else with a desire to study electricity economics as well as related applications.

Electricity economics. Production functions with electricity

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hu, Zhaoguang; Hu, Zheng

2013-01-01

The first book studies on the economics of electricity consumption. Compares the sector production functions with electricity and the commercial production functions with electricity. Introduces the global E-GDP function, the European E-GDP function and 12 national E-GDP functions. Presents the gene characters of EAI production functions and E-GDP functions for USA to see why USA's economy is entering an up-industrialization period. Discusses China's economic growth by production functions with electricity. Electricity Economics: Production Functions with Electricity studies the production output from analyzing patterns of electricity consumption. Since electricity data can be used to measure scenarios of economic performance due to its accuracy and reliability, it could therefore also be used to help scholars explore new research frontiers that directly and indirectly benefits human society. Our research initially explores a similar pattern to substitute the Cobb-Douglas function with the production function with electricity to track and forecast economic activities. The book systematically introduces the theoretical frameworks and mathematical models of economics from the perspective of electricity consumption. The E-GDP functions are presented for case studies of more than 20 developed and developing countries. These functions also demonstrate substantial similarities between human DNA and production functions with electricity in terms of four major characteristics, namely replication, mutation, uniqueness, and evolution. Furthermore, the book includes extensive data and case studies on the U.S., China, Japan, etc. It is intended for scientists, engineers, financial professionals, policy makers, consultants, and anyone else with a desire to study electricity economics as well as related applications.

Assessment of the pharmaceutical quality of marketed enteric coated pantoprazole sodium sesquihydrate products.

Science.gov (United States)

Mostafa, Haitham F; Ibrahim, Mohamed A; Mahrous, Gamal M; Sakr, Adel

2011-04-01

Pantoprazole sodium sesquihydrate (PSS) is a proton pump inhibitor, used in acid-related disorders, like peptic ulcer and gastroesophageal reflux. Increasing the number of pantoprazole containing products in the market, raises questions of its efficacy and generic substitution. The pharmaceutical quality of 6 generic PSS enteric coated tablets in 2 local markets was assessed relative to the innovator product (pantozol®). Uniformity of dosage unit, disintegration and in vitro drug release were determined using United States pharmacopeia for delayed release tablets. The similarity factor (f2) was assessed using the FDA recommended approach (f2 similarity factor). The content uniformity of the innovator product was 98.39% of the labeled claim with RSD value of 1.08%, while the content of generic products ranged from 96.98% to 98.80% with RSD values of 1.24-2.19%. All the products showed no disintegration, cracks or swelling in 0.1 N HCl, except product 1, which showed complete disintegration after 20 min. However, the disintegration of all the products in phosphate buffer met USP requirements. Dissolution of tablets in 0.1 N HCl showed no drug release after 2 h except product 1 in which one tablet showed a drug release more than 10% at acid stage level A1. In addition, three tablets of this product showed dissolution of 45%, 48% and 69% at acid stage level A2. The similarity factor f2 of the products was between 71 and 74 indicating the similarity in dissolution profiles of all the products in accordance to FDA requirements, except product 1 in which f2 value was 18.67.

Perceptions of Ideal and Former Partners’ Personality and Similarity

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Pieternel Dijkstra

2010-12-01

Full Text Available The present study aimed to test predictions based on both the ‗similarity-attraction‘ hypothesis and the ‗attraction-similarity‘ hypothesis, by studying perceptions of ideal and former partners. Based on the ‗similarity-attraction‘ hypothesis, we expected individuals to desire ideal partners who are similar to the self in personality. In addition, based on the ‗attraction-similarity hypothesis‘, we expected individuals to perceive former partners as dissimilar to them in terms of personality. Findings showed that, whereas the ideal partner was seen as similar to and more positive than the self, the former partner was seen as dissimilar to and more negative than the self. In addition, our study showed that individuals did not rate similarity in personality as very important when seeking a mate. Our findings may help understand why so many relationships end in divorce due to mismatches in personality.

When high similarity copycats lose and moderate similarity copycats gain: The impact of comparative evaluation

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Van Horen, F.; Pieters, R.

2012-01-01

Copycats imitate features of leading brands to free ride on their equity. The prevailing belief is that the more similar copycats are to the leader brand, the more positive their evaluation is, and thus the more they free ride. Three studies demonstrate when the reverse holds true:

When high similarity copycats lose and moderate similarity copycats gain : The impact of comparative evaluation

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van Horen, F.; Pieters, R.

2012-01-01

Copycats imitate features of leading brands to free ride on their equity. The prevailing belief is that the more similar copycats are to the leader brand, the more positive their evaluation is, and thus the more they free ride. Three studies demonstrate when the reverse holds true:

Systematic characterizations of text similarity in full text biomedical publications.

Science.gov (United States)

Sun, Zhaohui; Errami, Mounir; Long, Tara; Renard, Chris; Choradia, Nishant; Garner, Harold

2010-09-15

Computational methods have been used to find duplicate biomedical publications in MEDLINE. Full text articles are becoming increasingly available, yet the similarities among them have not been systematically studied. Here, we quantitatively investigated the full text similarity of biomedical publications in PubMed Central. 72,011 full text articles from PubMed Central (PMC) were parsed to generate three different datasets: full texts, sections, and paragraphs. Text similarity comparisons were performed on these datasets using the text similarity algorithm eTBLAST. We measured the frequency of similar text pairs and compared it among different datasets. We found that high abstract similarity can be used to predict high full text similarity with a specificity of 20.1% (95% CI [17.3%, 23.1%]) and sensitivity of 99.999%. Abstract similarity and full text similarity have a moderate correlation (Pearson correlation coefficient: -0.423) when the similarity ratio is above 0.4. Among pairs of articles in PMC, method sections are found to be the most repetitive (frequency of similar pairs, methods: 0.029, introduction: 0.0076, results: 0.0043). In contrast, among a set of manually verified duplicate articles, results are the most repetitive sections (frequency of similar pairs, results: 0.94, methods: 0.89, introduction: 0.82). Repetition of introduction and methods sections is more likely to be committed by the same authors (odds of a highly similar pair having at least one shared author, introduction: 2.31, methods: 1.83, results: 1.03). There is also significantly more similarity in pairs of review articles than in pairs containing one review and one nonreview paper (frequency of similar pairs: 0.0167 and 0.0023, respectively). While quantifying abstract similarity is an effective approach for finding duplicate citations, a comprehensive full text analysis is necessary to uncover all potential duplicate citations in the scientific literature and is helpful when

Characterization of a highly toxic strain of Bacillus thuringiensis serovar kurstaki very similar to the HD-73 strain.

Science.gov (United States)

Reinoso-Pozo, Yaritza; Del Rincón-Castro, Ma Cristina; Ibarra, Jorge E

2016-09-01

The LBIT-1200 strain of Bacillus thuringiensis was recently isolated from soil, and showed a 6.4 and 9.5 increase in toxicity, against Manduca sexta and Trichoplusia ni, respectively, compared to HD-73. However, LBIT-1200 was still highly similar to HD-73, including the production of bipyramidal crystals containing only one protein of ∼130 000 kDa, its flagellin gene sequence related to the kurstaki serotype, plasmid and RepPCR patterns similar to HD-73, no production of β-exotoxin and no presence of VIP genes. Sequencing of its cry gene showed the presence of a cry1Ac-type gene with four amino acid differences, including two amino acid replacements in domain III, compared to Cry1Ac1, which may explain its higher toxicity. In conclusion, the LBIT-1200 strain is a variant of the HD-73 strain but shows a much higher toxicity, which makes this new strain an important candidate to be developed as a bioinsecticide, once it passes other tests, throughout its biotechnological development. © FEMS 2016. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Towards Modelling Variation in Music as Foundation for Similarity

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Volk, A.; de Haas, W.B.; van Kranenburg, P.; Cambouropoulos, E.; Tsougras, C.; Mavromatis, P.; Pastiadis, K.

2012-01-01

This paper investigates the concept of variation in music from the perspective of music similarity. Music similarity is a central concept in Music Information Retrieval (MIR), however there exists no comprehensive approach to music similarity yet. As a consequence, MIR faces the challenge on how to

How similar are recognition memory and inductive reasoning?

Science.gov (United States)

Hayes, Brett K; Heit, Evan

2013-07-01

Conventionally, memory and reasoning are seen as different types of cognitive activities driven by different processes. In two experiments, we challenged this view by examining the relationship between recognition memory and inductive reasoning involving multiple forms of similarity. A common study set (members of a conjunctive category) was followed by a test set containing old and new category members, as well as items that matched the study set on only one dimension. The study and test sets were presented under recognition or induction instructions. In Experiments 1 and 2, the inductive property being generalized was varied in order to direct attention to different dimensions of similarity. When there was no time pressure on decisions, patterns of positive responding were strongly affected by property type, indicating that different types of similarity were driving recognition and induction. By comparison, speeded judgments showed weaker property effects and could be explained by generalization based on overall similarity. An exemplar model, GEN-EX (GENeralization from EXamples), could account for both the induction and recognition data. These findings show that induction and recognition share core component processes, even when the tasks involve flexible forms of similarity.

A Measure of Similarity Between Trajectories of Vessels

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Le QI

2016-03-01

Full Text Available The measurement of similarity between trajectories of vessels is one of the kernel problems that must be addressed to promote the development of maritime intelligent traffic system (ITS. In this study, a new model of trajectory similarity measurement was established to improve the data processing efficiency in dynamic application and to reflect actual sailing behaviors of vessels. In this model, a feature point detection algorithm was proposed to extract feature points, reduce data storage space and save computational resources. A new synthesized distance algorithm was also created to measure the similarity between trajectories by using the extracted feature points. An experiment was conducted to measure the similarity between the real trajectories of vessels. The growth of these trajectories required measurements to be conducted under different voyages. The results show that the similarity measurement between the vessel trajectories is efficient and correct. Comparison of the synthesized distance with the sailing behaviors of vessels proves that results are consistent with actual situations. The experiment results demonstrate the promising application of the proposed model in studying vessel traffic and in supplying reliable data for the development of maritime ITS.

Multi-Scale Scattering Transform in Music Similarity Measuring

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Ruobai

Scattering transform is a Mel-frequency spectrum based, time-deformation stable method, which can be used in evaluating music similarity. Compared with Dynamic time warping, it has better performance in detecting similar audio signals under local time-frequency deformation. Multi-scale scattering means to combine scattering transforms of different window lengths. This paper argues that, multi-scale scattering transform is a good alternative of dynamic time warping in music similarity measuring. We tested the performance of multi-scale scattering transform against other popular methods, with data designed to represent different conditions.

Disinfectant Products Fact Sheet. To assess the risks for the consumer

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Prud'homme de Lodder LCH; Bremmer HJ; Pelgrom SMGJ; Park MVDZ; Engelen JGM van; SIR

2006-01-01

Exposure to compounds in consumer products can be assessed using the computer program ConsExpo (Consumer Exposure). Given the huge number of consumer products, it is not possible to calculate the exposure for each separate product, so a limited number of groups containing similar products are

Self-similarity in applied superconductivity

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Dresner, Lawrence

1981-09-01

Self-similarity is a descriptive term applying to a family of curves. It means that the family is invariant to a one-parameter group of affine (stretching) transformations. The property of self-similarity has been exploited in a wide variety of problems in applied superconductivity, namely, (i) transient distribution of the current among the filaments of a superconductor during charge-up, (ii) steady distribution of current among the filaments of a superconductor near the current leads, (iii) transient heat transfer in superfluid helium, (iv) transient diffusion in cylindrical geometry (important in studying the growth rate of the reacted layer in A15 materials), (v) thermal expulsion of helium from quenching cable-in-conduit conductors, (vi) eddy current heating of irregular plates by slow, ramped fields, and (vii) the specific heat of type-II superconductors. Most, but not all, of the applications involve differential equations, both ordinary and partial. The novel methods explained in this report should prove of great value in other fields, just as they already have done in applied superconductivity. (author)

Mixed quantization dimensions of self-similar measures

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Dai Meifeng; Wang Xiaoli; Chen Dandan

2012-01-01

Highlights: ► We define the mixed quantization dimension of finitely many measures. ► Formula of mixed quantization dimensions of self-similar measures is given. ► Illustrate the behavior of mixed quantization dimension as a function of order. - Abstract: Classical multifractal analysis studies the local scaling behaviors of a single measure. However recently mixed multifractal has generated interest. The purpose of this paper is some results about the mixed quantization dimensions of self-similar measures.

Isentropic and non-isentropic sel-similar implosions

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Rodriguez, Manuel; Linan, Amable.

1978-01-01

The self-similar motion of an implosive shock at the instant close to the reflection time at the center of the sphere (or cylinder), before and after that reflection occurs, is described. The material is considered to be a perfect gas. A detailed analysis is given of the ordinary differential equations that describe the velocity, density and pressure distributions, obtaining the numerical solution for several values of sigma. Asymptotic solutions are given for small values of 1/sigma and (sigma - 1). Also, the self-similar process of the isentropic compression of a sphere (or cylinder), with initial conditions of uniform density and zero velocity, is given. An asimptotic solution, valid for large values of the maximum density ratio, is obtained. As a part of the solution, it is obtained the pressure-time dependence needed at the outer surface to get the self-similar solution. (author)

Comparative study of the second antibody for radioimmunoassay totally produced in the country to a similar imported one (sheep serum anti-rabbit IgG)

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Silva, S.R. da; Borghi, V.C.; Wajchenberg, B.L.

1992-01-01

This work compares a second antibody for radioimmunoassay (RIA) produced at IPEN-CNEN/SP with a commercial one of known quality, produced by Radioassay Systems Laboratories, U.S.A.. This antiserum, sheep serum anti-rabbit IgG produced in its totality in the country, presented title and precipitation characteristics similar to those exhibited by the commercial product, being as suitable for the RIA separation as its imported similar. (author)

On the mechanism of hadron cumulative production on nucleus

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Efremov, A.V.

1976-01-01

A mechanism of cumulative production of hadrons on nucleus is proposed which is similar to that of high perpendicular hadron production. The cross section obtained describes the main qualitative features of such prosesses, e.g., initial energy dependence atomic number behaviour, dependence on the rest mass of the produced particle and its production angle

An electrophysiological signature of summed similarity in visual working memory.

Science.gov (United States)

van Vugt, Marieke K; Sekuler, Robert; Wilson, Hugh R; Kahana, Michael J

2013-05-01

Summed-similarity models of short-term item recognition posit that participants base their judgments of an item's prior occurrence on that item's summed similarity to the ensemble of items on the remembered list. We examined the neural predictions of these models in 3 short-term recognition memory experiments using electrocorticographic/depth electrode recordings and scalp electroencephalography. On each experimental trial, participants judged whether a test face had been among a small set of recently studied faces. Consistent with summed-similarity theory, participants' tendency to endorse a test item increased as a function of its summed similarity to the items on the just-studied list. To characterize this behavioral effect of summed similarity, we successfully fit a summed-similarity model to individual participant data from each experiment. Using the parameters determined from fitting the summed-similarity model to the behavioral data, we examined the relation between summed similarity and brain activity. We found that 4-9 Hz theta activity in the medial temporal lobe and 2-4 Hz delta activity recorded from frontal and parietal cortices increased with summed similarity. These findings demonstrate direct neural correlates of the similarity computations that form the foundation of several major cognitive theories of human recognition memory. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.

Processing Chains for Desis and Enmap Imaging Spectroscopy Data: Similarities and Differences

Science.gov (United States)

Storch, T.; Müller, R.

2017-10-01

The Earth Observation Center (EOC) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) realizes operational processors for DESIS (DLR Earth Sensing Imaging Spectrometer) and EnMAP (Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program) high-resolution imaging spectroscopy remote sensing satellite missions. DESIS is planned to be launched in 2018 and EnMAP in 2020. The developmental (namely schedule, deployment, and team) and functional (namely processing levels, algorithms in processors, and archiving approaches) similarities and differences of the fully-automatic processors are analyzed. The processing chains generate high-quality standardized image products for users at different levels taking characterization and calibration data into account. EOC has long lasting experiences with the airborne and spaceborne acquisition, processing, and analysis of hyperspectral image data. It turns out that both activities strongly benefit from each other.

Glove boxes and similar containments

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Anon.

1975-01-01

According to the present invention a glove box or similar containment is provided with an exhaust system including a vortex amplifier venting into the system, the vortex amplifier also having its main inlet in fluid flow connection with the containment and a control inlet in fluid flow connection with the atmosphere outside the containment. (U.S.)

Product quality of parenteral vancomycin products in the United States.

Science.gov (United States)

Nambiar, S; Madurawe, R D; Zuk, S M; Khan, S R; Ellison, C D; Faustino, P J; Mans, D J; Trehy, M L; Hadwiger, M E; Boyne, M T; Biswas, K; Cox, E M

2012-06-01

In response to concerns raised about the quality of parenteral vancomycin products, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating the product quality of all FDA-approved parenteral vancomycin products available in the United States. Product quality was evaluated independently at two FDA Office of Testing and Research (FDA-OTR) sites. In the next phase of the investigation, being done in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the in vivo activity of these products will be evaluated in an appropriate animal model. This paper summarizes results of the FDA investigation completed thus far. One site used a validated ultrahigh-pressure liquid chromatography method (OTR-UPLC), and the second site used the high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method for related substances provided in the British Pharmacopeia (BP) monograph for vancomycin intravenous infusion. Similar results were obtained by the two FDA-OTR laboratories using two different analytical methods. The products tested had 90 to 95% vancomycin B (active component of vancomycin) by the BP-HPLC method and 89 to 94% vancomycin by OTR-UPLC methods. Total impurities were 5 to 10% by BP-HPLC and 6 to 11% by OTR-UPLC methods. No single impurity was >2.0%, and the CDP-1 level was ≤ 2.0% across all products. Some variability in impurity profiles of the various products was observed. No adverse product quality issues were identified with the six U.S. vancomycin parenteral products. The quality parameters of all parenteral vancomycin products tested surpassed the United States Pharmacopeia acceptance criteria. Additional testing will characterize in vivo performance characteristics of these products.

Density-based retrieval from high-similarity image databases

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hansen, Michael Edberg; Carstensen, Jens Michael

2004-01-01

Many image classification problems can fruitfully be thought of as image retrieval in a "high similarity image database" (HSID) characterized by being tuned towards a specific application and having a high degree of visual similarity between entries that should be distinguished. We introduce a me...

A Framework for Analysis of Music Similarity Measures

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jensen, Jesper Højvang; Christensen, Mads G.; Jensen, Søren Holdt

2007-01-01

To analyze specific properties of music similarity measures that the commonly used genre classification evaluation procedure does not reveal, we introduce a MIDI based test framework for music similarity measures. We introduce the framework by example and thus outline an experiment to analyze the...

Benfotiamine is similar to thiamine in correcting endothelial cell defects induced by high glucose.

Science.gov (United States)

Pomero, F; Molinar Min, A; La Selva, M; Allione, A; Molinatti, G M; Porta, M

2001-01-01

We investigated the hypothesis that benfotiamine, a lipophilic derivative of thiamine, affects replication delay and generation of advanced glycosylation end-products (AGE) in human umbilical vein endothelial cells cultured in the presence of high glucose. Cells were grown in physiological (5.6 mM) and high (28.0 mM) concentrations of D-glucose, with and without 150 microM thiamine or benfotiamine. Cell proliferation was measured by mitochondrial dehydrogenase activity. AGE generation after 20 days was assessed fluorimetrically. Cell replication was impaired by high glucose (72.3%+/-5.1% of that in physiological glucose, p=0.001). This was corrected by the addition of either thiamine (80.6%+/-2.4%, p=0.005) or benfotiamine (87.5%+/-8.9%, p=0.006), although it not was completely normalized (p=0.001 and p=0.008, respectively) to that in physiological glucose. Increased AGE production in high glucose (159.7%+/-38.9% of fluorescence in physiological glucose, p=0.003) was reduced by thiamine (113.2%+/-16.3%, p=0.008 vs. high glucose alone) or benfotiamine (135.6%+/-49.8%, p=0.03 vs. high glucose alone) to levels similar to those observed in physiological glucose. Benfotiamine, a derivative of thiamine with better bioavailability, corrects defective replication and increased AGE generation in endothelial cells cultured in high glucose, to a similar extent as thiamine. These effects may result from normalization of accelerated glycolysis and the consequent decrease in metabolites that are extremely active in generating nonenzymatic protein glycation. The potential role of thiamine administration in the prevention or treatment of vascular complications of diabetes deserves further investigation.

Mechanics of ultra-stretchable self-similar serpentine interconnects

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Zhang, Yihui; Fu, Haoran; Su, Yewang; Xu, Sheng

2013-01-01

Graphical abstract: We developed analytical models of flexibility and elastic-stretchability for self-similar interconnect. The analytic solutions agree very well with the finite element analyses, both demonstrating that the elastic-stretchability more than doubles when the order of self-similar structure increases by one. Design optimization yields 90% and 50% elastic stretchability for systems with surface filling ratios of 50% and 70% of active devices, respectively. The analytic models are useful for the development of stretchable electronics that simultaneously demand large coverage of active devices, such as stretchable photovoltaics and electronic eye-ball cameras. -- Abstract: Electrical interconnects that adopt self-similar, serpentine layouts offer exceptional levels of stretchability in systems that consist of collections of small, non-stretchable active devices in the so-called island–bridge design. This paper develops analytical models of flexibility and elastic stretchability for such structures, and establishes recursive formulae at different orders of self-similarity. The analytic solutions agree well with finite element analysis, with both demonstrating that the elastic stretchability more than doubles when the order of the self-similar structure increases by one. Design optimization yields 90% and 50% elastic stretchability for systems with surface filling ratios of 50% and 70% of active devices, respectively

High performance liquid chromatographic analysis of insulin degradation products from a cultured kidney cell line

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Duckworth, W.C.; Hamel, F.G.; Liepnieks, J.; Frank, B.H.; Yagil, C.; Rabkin, R.

1988-01-01

The kidney is a major site for insulin removal and degradation, but the subcellular processes and enzymes involved have not been established. We have examined this process by analyzing insulin degradation products by HPLC. Monoiodoinsulin specifically labeled on either the A14 or B26 tyrosine residue was incubated with a cultured kidney epithelial cell line, and both intracellular and extracellular products were examined on HPLC. The products were then compared with products of known structure generated by hepatocytes and the enzyme insulin protease. Intracellular and extracellular products were different, suggesting two different degradative pathways, as previously shown in liver. The extracellular degradation products eluted from HPLC both before and after sulfitolysis similarly with hepatocyte products and products generated by insulin protease. The intracellular products also eluted identically with hepatocyte products. Based on comparisons with identified products, the kidney cell generates two fragments from the A chain of intact insulin, one with a cleavage at A13-A14 and the other at A14-A15. The B chain of intact insulin is cleaved in a number of different sites, resulting in peptides that elute identically with B chain peptides cleaved at B9-B10, B13-B14, B16-B17, B24-B25, and B25-B26. These similarities with hepatocytes and insulin protease suggest that liver and kidney have similar mechanisms for insulin degradation and that insulin protease or a very similar enzyme is involved in both tissues

Scaling, Similarity, and the Fourth Paradigm for Hydrology

Science.gov (United States)

Peters-Lidard, Christa D.; Clark, Martyn; Samaniego, Luis; Verhoest, Niko E. C.; van Emmerik, Tim; Uijlenhoet, Remko; Achieng, Kevin; Franz, Trenton E.; Woods, Ross

2017-01-01

In this synthesis paper addressing hydrologic scaling and similarity, we posit that roadblocks in the search for universal laws of hydrology are hindered by our focus on computational simulation (the third paradigm), and assert that it is time for hydrology to embrace a fourth paradigm of data-intensive science. Advances in information-based hydrologic science, coupled with an explosion of hydrologic data and advances in parameter estimation and modelling, have laid the foundation for a data-driven framework for scrutinizing hydrological scaling and similarity hypotheses. We summarize important scaling and similarity concepts (hypotheses) that require testing, describe a mutual information framework for testing these hypotheses, describe boundary condition, state flux, and parameter data requirements across scales to support testing these hypotheses, and discuss some challenges to overcome while pursuing the fourth hydrological paradigm. We call upon the hydrologic sciences community to develop a focused effort towards adopting the fourth paradigm and apply this to outstanding challenges in scaling and similarity.

Size, productivity, and international banking

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Buch, Claudia M.; Koch, Catherine T.; Koetter, Michael

Heterogeneity in size and productivity is central to models that explain which manufacturing firms expert. This study presents descriptive evidence on similar heterogeneity among international banks as financial services providers. A novel and detailed bank-level data set reveals the volume and mode

Similar words analysis based on POS-CBOW language model

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dongru RUAN

2015-10-01

Full Text Available Similar words analysis is one of the important aspects in the field of natural language processing, and it has important research and application values in text classification, machine translation and information recommendation. Focusing on the features of Sina Weibo's short text, this paper presents a language model named as POS-CBOW, which is a kind of continuous bag-of-words language model with the filtering layer and part-of-speech tagging layer. The proposed approach can adjust the word vectors' similarity according to the cosine similarity and the word vectors' part-of-speech metrics. It can also filter those similar words set on the base of the statistical analysis model. The experimental result shows that the similar words analysis algorithm based on the proposed POS-CBOW language model is better than that based on the traditional CBOW language model.

Average is Boring: How Similarity Kills a Meme's Success

Science.gov (United States)

Coscia, Michele

2014-09-01

Every day we are exposed to different ideas, or memes, competing with each other for our attention. Previous research explained popularity and persistence heterogeneity of memes by assuming them in competition for limited attention resources, distributed in a heterogeneous social network. Little has been said about what characteristics make a specific meme more likely to be successful. We propose a similarity-based explanation: memes with higher similarity to other memes have a significant disadvantage in their potential popularity. We employ a meme similarity measure based on semantic text analysis and computer vision to prove that a meme is more likely to be successful and to thrive if its characteristics make it unique. Our results show that indeed successful memes are located in the periphery of the meme similarity space and that our similarity measure is a promising predictor of a meme success.

Similarity analyses of chromatographic herbal fingerprints: A review

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Goodarzi, Mohammad; Russell, Paul J.; Vander Heyden, Yvan

2013-01-01

Graphical abstract: -- Highlights: •Similarity analyses of herbal fingerprints are reviewed. •Different (dis)similarity approaches are discussed. •(Dis)similarity-metrics and exploratory-analysis approaches are illustrated. •Correlation and distance-based measures are overviewed. •Similarity analyses illustrated by several case studies. -- Abstract: Herbal medicines are becoming again more popular in the developed countries because being “natural” and people thus often assume that they are inherently safe. Herbs have also been used worldwide for many centuries in the traditional medicines. The concern of their safety and efficacy has grown since increasing western interest. Herbal materials and their extracts are very complex, often including hundreds of compounds. A thorough understanding of their chemical composition is essential for conducting a safety risk assessment. However, herbal material can show considerable variability. The chemical constituents and their amounts in a herb can be different, due to growing conditions, such as climate and soil, the drying process, the harvest season, etc. Among the analytical methods, chromatographic fingerprinting has been recommended as a potential and reliable methodology for the identification and quality control of herbal medicines. Identification is needed to avoid fraud and adulteration. Currently, analyzing chromatographic herbal fingerprint data sets has become one of the most applied tools in quality assessment of herbal materials. Mostly, the entire chromatographic profiles are used to identify or to evaluate the quality of the herbs investigated. Occasionally only a limited number of compounds are considered. One approach to the safety risk assessment is to determine whether the herbal material is substantially equivalent to that which is either readily consumed in the diet, has a history of application or has earlier been commercialized i.e. to what is considered as reference material. In order

Similarity analyses of chromatographic herbal fingerprints: A review

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Goodarzi, Mohammad [Department of Analytical Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Technology, Center for Pharmaceutical Research, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Laarbeeklaan 103, B-1090 Brussels (Belgium); Russell, Paul J. [Safety and Environmental Assurance Centre, Unilever, Colworth Science Park, Sharnbrook, Bedfordshire MK44 1LQ (United Kingdom); Vander Heyden, Yvan, E-mail: yvanvdh@vub.ac.be [Department of Analytical Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Technology, Center for Pharmaceutical Research, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Laarbeeklaan 103, B-1090 Brussels (Belgium)

2013-12-04

Graphical abstract: -- Highlights: •Similarity analyses of herbal fingerprints are reviewed. •Different (dis)similarity approaches are discussed. •(Dis)similarity-metrics and exploratory-analysis approaches are illustrated. •Correlation and distance-based measures are overviewed. •Similarity analyses illustrated by several case studies. -- Abstract: Herbal medicines are becoming again more popular in the developed countries because being “natural” and people thus often assume that they are inherently safe. Herbs have also been used worldwide for many centuries in the traditional medicines. The concern of their safety and efficacy has grown since increasing western interest. Herbal materials and their extracts are very complex, often including hundreds of compounds. A thorough understanding of their chemical composition is essential for conducting a safety risk assessment. However, herbal material can show considerable variability. The chemical constituents and their amounts in a herb can be different, due to growing conditions, such as climate and soil, the drying process, the harvest season, etc. Among the analytical methods, chromatographic fingerprinting has been recommended as a potential and reliable methodology for the identification and quality control of herbal medicines. Identification is needed to avoid fraud and adulteration. Currently, analyzing chromatographic herbal fingerprint data sets has become one of the most applied tools in quality assessment of herbal materials. Mostly, the entire chromatographic profiles are used to identify or to evaluate the quality of the herbs investigated. Occasionally only a limited number of compounds are considered. One approach to the safety risk assessment is to determine whether the herbal material is substantially equivalent to that which is either readily consumed in the diet, has a history of application or has earlier been commercialized i.e. to what is considered as reference material. In order

Epistemic Similarities between Students' Scientific and Supernatural Beliefs

Science.gov (United States)

Shtulman, Andrew

2013-01-01

The evidential support for scientific claims is quantitatively and qualitatively superior to that for supernatural claims, yet students may not appreciate this difference in light of the fact that both types of claims are learned in similar ways (through testimony rather than firsthand observation) and perform similar functions (explaining…

Self-similar solution for coupled thermal electromagnetic model ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

An investigation into the existence and uniqueness solution of self-similar solution for the coupled Maxwell and Pennes Bio-heat equations have been done. Criteria for existence and uniqueness of self-similar solution are revealed in the consequent theorems. Journal of the Nigerian Association of Mathematical Physics ...

Strategy of Trade-Reliable Featured Product Supporting Regional Innovation Systems

Science.gov (United States)

Riskiawan, H. Y.; Purnomo, B. H.; Abdurahman, A.; Hariono, B.; Puspitasari, T. D.

2018-01-01

Pacitan, Ponorogo, and Magetan had planned the development of featured products as contained in the Medium Term Development Plan (MTDP) until 2020. The focus of development is almost similar to featured products derived from agribusiness, food processing, handycrafts, and tourism. The geographical proximity results characteristics of natural resources and social culture have similarities, including the type of featured products, constraints, problems, and opportunities for development. Given the characteristics and the support system of some featured products contained in these three regions have a lot in common and their functional interactions involving actors from across the region, it is necessary to develop cross-jurisdictional policy. The resulting strategy should be able to support the development of Regional Innovation System (RIS). The purpose of this research is 1) Determining featured product cross-regional between Pacitan regency; Ponorogo and Magetan districts in support of RIS development; and 2) Designing a featured product development strategy using supply chain management in order to drive the local economy. Based on the results of research conducted, featured products across the region that have potentiality to be developed are: processed products of “janggelan” leather products, and woven bamboo.

Similarities and differences among fluid milk products: traditionally produced, extended shelf life and ultrahigh-temperature processed.

Science.gov (United States)

Grabowski, N T; Ahlfeld, B; Brix, A; Hagemann, A; von Münchhausen, C; Klein, G

2013-06-01

Extended shelf life milk is a relatively new kind of fluid milk, generally manufactured by high-temperature treatment and/or micro-filtration. Being advertised as 'pasteurized milk with an extended shelf life', its flavour, compositional quality and labelling was questioned. Extended shelf life (high-temperature treatment), pasteurized ('traditionally produced') and ultrahigh-temperature milk were, therefore, compared at the beginning and end of shelf life. In triangle tests, panellists distinguished clearly between all products. High-temperature treatment milk's flavour was closer to ultrahigh-temperature and traditionally produced milk in the beginning and at the end of shelf life, respectively. Physicochemically and bacteriologically, all three types could be distinguished. Since 'extended shelf life' comprises many process varieties (each affecting flavour differently), consumer information and appropriate package labelling beyond 'long-lasting' is necessary, e.g. by mentioning the heat treatment applied.

Similarity Analysis of Cable Insulations by Chemical Test

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Kim, Jong Seog [Central Research Institute of Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Co., Daejeon (Korea, Republic of)

2013-10-15

As result of this experiment, it was found that FT-IR test for material composition, TGA test for aging trend are applicable for similarity analysis of cable materials. OIT is recommended as option if TGA doesn't show good trend. Qualification of new insulation by EQ report of old insulation should be based on higher activation energy of new insulation than that of old one in the consideration of conservatism. In old nuclear power plant, it is easy to find black cable which has no marking of cable information such as manufacturer, material name and voltage. If a type test is required for qualification of these cables, how could I select representative cable? How could I determine the similarity of these cables? If manufacturer has qualified a cable for nuclear power plant more than a decade ago and composition of cable material is changed with similar one, is it acceptable to use the old EQ report for recently manufactured cable? It is well known to use FT-IR method to determine the similarity of cable materials. Infrared ray is easy tool to compare compositions of each material. But, it is not proper to compare aging trend of these materials. Study for similarity analysis of cable insulation by chemical test is described herein. To study a similarity evaluation method for polymer materials, FT-IR, TGA and OIT tests were performed for two cable insulation(old and new) which were supplied from same manufacturer. FT-IR shows good result to compare material compositions while TGA and OIT show good result to compare aging character of materials.

Similarity Analysis of Cable Insulations by Chemical Test

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kim, Jong Seog

2013-01-01

As result of this experiment, it was found that FT-IR test for material composition, TGA test for aging trend are applicable for similarity analysis of cable materials. OIT is recommended as option if TGA doesn't show good trend. Qualification of new insulation by EQ report of old insulation should be based on higher activation energy of new insulation than that of old one in the consideration of conservatism. In old nuclear power plant, it is easy to find black cable which has no marking of cable information such as manufacturer, material name and voltage. If a type test is required for qualification of these cables, how could I select representative cable? How could I determine the similarity of these cables? If manufacturer has qualified a cable for nuclear power plant more than a decade ago and composition of cable material is changed with similar one, is it acceptable to use the old EQ report for recently manufactured cable? It is well known to use FT-IR method to determine the similarity of cable materials. Infrared ray is easy tool to compare compositions of each material. But, it is not proper to compare aging trend of these materials. Study for similarity analysis of cable insulation by chemical test is described herein. To study a similarity evaluation method for polymer materials, FT-IR, TGA and OIT tests were performed for two cable insulation(old and new) which were supplied from same manufacturer. FT-IR shows good result to compare material compositions while TGA and OIT show good result to compare aging character of materials

Egg production, growth and development of the cyclopoid copepod Oithona similis

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Sabatini, Marina; Kiørboe, Thomas

1994-01-01

Egg production, growth and development rates of Oithona similis were measured in the laboratory as a function of food concentration and composition. On an optimum diet, development is isochronal and growth is near exponential. The maximum juvenile growth rate at 15 degree C (0.2 day-1) is similar...... to juvenile growth in calanoid copepods. The maximum weight-specific egg production rate (0.1 day-1), on the other hand, is substantially less than in free-spawning calanoids, but similar to that in egg-carrying calanoids. In the Kattegat, Oithona spp. egg production is strongly limited by food during summer...

Semantic similarity measure in biomedical domain leverage web search engine.

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Chi-Huang; Hsieh, Sheau-Ling; Weng, Yung-Ching; Chang, Wen-Yung; Lai, Feipei

2010-01-01

Semantic similarity measure plays an essential role in Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing. In this paper we propose a page-count-based semantic similarity measure and apply it in biomedical domains. Previous researches in semantic web related applications have deployed various semantic similarity measures. Despite the usefulness of the measurements in those applications, measuring semantic similarity between two terms remains a challenge task. The proposed method exploits page counts returned by the Web Search Engine. We define various similarity scores for two given terms P and Q, using the page counts for querying P, Q and P AND Q. Moreover, we propose a novel approach to compute semantic similarity using lexico-syntactic patterns with page counts. These different similarity scores are integrated adapting support vector machines, to leverage the robustness of semantic similarity measures. Experimental results on two datasets achieve correlation coefficients of 0.798 on the dataset provided by A. Hliaoutakis, 0.705 on the dataset provide by T. Pedersen with physician scores and 0.496 on the dataset provided by T. Pedersen et al. with expert scores.

Measure of Node Similarity in Multilayer Networks

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Møllgaard, Anders; Zettler, Ingo; Dammeyer, Jesper

2016-01-01

university.Our analysis is based on data obtained using smartphones equipped with customdata collection software, complemented by questionnaire-based data. The networkof social contacts is represented as a weighted multilayer network constructedfrom different channels of telecommunication as well as data...... might bepresent in one layer of the multilayer network and simultaneously be absent inthe other layers. For a variable such as gender, our measure reveals atransition from similarity between nodes connected with links of relatively lowweight to dis-similarity for the nodes connected by the strongest...

Pythoscape: a framework for generation of large protein similarity networks.

Science.gov (United States)

Barber, Alan E; Babbitt, Patricia C

2012-11-01

Pythoscape is a framework implemented in Python for processing large protein similarity networks for visualization in other software packages. Protein similarity networks are graphical representations of sequence, structural and other similarities among proteins for which pairwise all-by-all similarity connections have been calculated. Mapping of biological and other information to network nodes or edges enables hypothesis creation about sequence-structure-function relationships across sets of related proteins. Pythoscape provides several options to calculate pairwise similarities for input sequences or structures, applies filters to network edges and defines sets of similar nodes and their associated data as single nodes (termed representative nodes) for compression of network information and output data or formatted files for visualization.

Product Market Integration, Comparative Advantages and Labour Market Performance

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Andersen, Torben M.; Rose Skaksen, Jan

2004-01-01

of the specialization gains are similar to anincrease in labour productivity, whereas the labour market reform effectis similar to an increase in the degree of competition in the labourmarket. Wages, employment and welfare increase as a result of furtherproduct market integration. It is interesting to note......In this paper, we set up a two-country general equilibrium modelwhere trade unions have wage bargaining power. We show that adecrease in trade distortions inducing further product market integrationgives rise to specialization gains as well as a labour market reformeffect. The implications...... that the labourmarket reform effect of product market integration is achieved despitean increase in the wage level.JEL Classification: F15, J30, J50.Keywords: Trade frictions, wage formation, employment, welfaregains....

Self-similar solutions of certain coupled integrable systems

CERN Document Server

Chakravarty, S; Kent, S L

2003-01-01

Similarity reductions of the coupled nonlinear Schroedinger equation and an integrable version of the coupled Maxwell-Bloch system are obtained by applying non-translational symmetries. The reduced system of coupled ordinary differential equations are solved in terms of Painleve transcendents, leading to new exact self-similar solutions for these integrable equations.

Self-similar solutions of certain coupled integrable systems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Chakravarty, S; Halburd, R G; Kent, S L

2003-01-01

Similarity reductions of the coupled nonlinear Schroedinger equation and an integrable version of the coupled Maxwell-Bloch system are obtained by applying non-translational symmetries. The reduced system of coupled ordinary differential equations are solved in terms of Painleve transcendents, leading to new exact self-similar solutions for these integrable equations

Efficient estimation for high similarities using odd sketches

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mitzenmacher, Michael; Pagh, Rasmus; Pham, Ninh Dang

2014-01-01

. This means that Odd Sketches provide a highly space-efficient estimator for sets of high similarity, which is relevant in applications such as web duplicate detection, collaborative filtering, and association rule learning. The method extends to weighted Jaccard similarity, relevant e.g. for TF-IDF vector...... and web duplicate detection tasks....

Contrasting platform thinking and product modularization

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Boer, Henrike Engele Elisabeth; Persson, Magnus

2015-01-01

Product modularization and platform thinking are both practices that seek to alleviate the negative impact of product customization and variety on internal operations by relying on economies of substitution. Through the use of a standardized pool of components and interfaces, these practices aim...... to create a broad spectrum of product choices. At first sight, product modularization and platform thinking are very similar. The difference between these practices can, however, be found in the manner in which they employ standardization. Where product modularization focuses on creating standardized...... variants. There is a general lack of research addressing the contingency factors that dictate the appropriateness of the use of product modularization and platform thinking in different contexts. To our knowledge, no large-scale empirical research has been reported in which the two concepts, contextual...

Early Implementation of QbD in Biopharmaceutical Development: A Practical Example

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jesús Zurdo

2015-01-01

Full Text Available In drug development, the “onus” of the low R&D efficiency has been put traditionally onto the drug discovery process (i.e., finding the right target or “binding” functionality. Here, we show that manufacturing is not only a central component of product success, but also that, by integrating manufacturing and discovery activities in a “holistic” interpretation of QbD methodologies, we could expect to increase the efficiency of the drug discovery process as a whole. In this new context, early risk assessment, using developability methodologies and computational methods in particular, can assist in reducing risks during development in a cost-effective way. We define specific areas of risk and how they can impact product quality in a broad sense, including essential aspects such as product efficacy and patient safety. Emerging industry practices around developability are introduced, including some specific examples of applications to biotherapeutics. Furthermore, we suggest some potential workflows to illustrate how developability strategies can be introduced in practical terms during early drug development in order to mitigate risks, reduce drug attrition and ultimately increase the robustness of the biopharmaceutical supply chain. Finally, we also discuss how the implementation of such methodologies could accelerate the access of new therapeutic treatments to patients in the clinic.

Classification of Unknown Thermocouple Types Using Similarity Factor Measurement

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Seshu K. DAMARLA

2011-01-01

Full Text Available In contrast to classification using PCA method, a new methodology is proposed for type identification of unknown thermocouple. The new methodology is based on calculating the degree of similarity between two multivariate datasets using two types of similarity factors. One similarity factor is based on principle component analysis and the angles between the principle component subspaces while the other is based on the Mahalanobis distance between the datasets. Datasets containing thermo-emfs against given temperature ranges are formed for each type of thermocouple (e.g. J, K, S, T, R, E, B and N type by experimentation are considered as reference datasets. Datasets corresponding to unknown type are captured. Similarity factor between the datasets one of which being the unknown type and the other being each known type are compared. When maximum similarity factor occurs, then the class of unknown type is allocated to that of known type.

27 CFR 46.166 - Dealing in tobacco products.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... packages, provided the products remain in the packages until removed by the customer or in the presence of the customer. Where a vending machine is used, tobacco products must similarly be vended in proper... consumption in the United States unless such articles are removed from their export packaging and repackaged...

Reconciling phonological neighborhood effects in speech production through single trial analysis

OpenAIRE

Sadat Schaffai, Jasmin, 1982-; Martin, Clara D.; Costa Martínez, Albert, 1970-; Alario, F.-Xavier (François -Xavier),

2014-01-01

A crucial step for understanding how lexical knowledge is represented is to describe the relative similarity of lexical items, and how it influences language processing. Previous studies of the effects of form similarity on word production have reported conflicting results, notably within and across languages. The aim of the present study was to clarify this empirical issue to provide specific constraints for theoretical models of language production. We investigated the role of phonological ...

Productivity spillovers of organization capital

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Chen, Wen; Inklaar, Robert

Investments in organization capital increase productivity of not just the investing firm but could also spillover to other firms-similar to investments in research and development. Recent evidence at the industry and economy level suggests such spillovers could be important. In this paper, we fail

Cultural similarity and adjustment of expatriate academics

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Selmer, Jan; Lauring, Jakob

2009-01-01

The findings of a number of recent empirical studies of business expatriates, using different samples and methodologies, seem to support the counter-intuitive proposition that cultural similarity may be as difficult to adjust to as cultural dissimilarity. However, it is not obvious...... and non-EU countries. Results showed that although the perceived cultural similarity between host and home country for the two groups of investigated respondents was different, there was neither any difference in their adjustment nor in the time it took for them to become proficient. Implications...

Beneficial properties of probiotic yeast Saccharomyces boulardii

OpenAIRE

Tomičić Zorica M.; Čolović Radmilo R.; Čabarkapa Ivana S.; Vukmirović Đuro M.; Đuragić Olivera M.; Tomičić Ružica M.

2016-01-01

Saccharomyces boulardii is unique probiotic and biotherapeutic yeast, known to survive in gastric acidity and it is not adversely affected or inhibited by antibiotics or does not alter or adversely affect the normal microbiota. S. boulardii has been utilized worldwide as a probiotic supplement to support gastrointestinal health. The multiple mechanisms of action of S. boulardii and its properties may explain its efficacy and beneficial effects in acute and chronic gastrointestinal diseases th...

Understanding similarity of groundwater systems with empirical copulas

Science.gov (United States)

Haaf, Ezra; Kumar, Rohini; Samaniego, Luis; Barthel, Roland

2016-04-01

Within the classification framework for groundwater systems that aims for identifying similarity of hydrogeological systems and transferring information from a well-observed to an ungauged system (Haaf and Barthel, 2015; Haaf and Barthel, 2016), we propose a copula-based method for describing groundwater-systems similarity. Copulas are an emerging method in hydrological sciences that make it possible to model the dependence structure of two groundwater level time series, independently of the effects of their marginal distributions. This study is based on Samaniego et al. (2010), which described an approach calculating dissimilarity measures from bivariate empirical copula densities of streamflow time series. Subsequently, streamflow is predicted in ungauged basins by transferring properties from similar catchments. The proposed approach is innovative because copula-based similarity has not yet been applied to groundwater systems. Here we estimate the pairwise dependence structure of 600 wells in Southern Germany using 10 years of weekly groundwater level observations. Based on these empirical copulas, dissimilarity measures are estimated, such as the copula's lower- and upper corner cumulated probability, copula-based Spearman's rank correlation - as proposed by Samaniego et al. (2010). For the characterization of groundwater systems, copula-based metrics are compared with dissimilarities obtained from precipitation signals corresponding to the presumed area of influence of each groundwater well. This promising approach provides a new tool for advancing similarity-based classification of groundwater system dynamics. Haaf, E., Barthel, R., 2015. Methods for assessing hydrogeological similarity and for classification of groundwater systems on the regional scale, EGU General Assembly 2015, Vienna, Austria. Haaf, E., Barthel, R., 2016. An approach for classification of hydrogeological systems at the regional scale based on groundwater hydrographs EGU General Assembly

Similarity indices of meteo-climatic gauging stations: definition and comparison.

Science.gov (United States)

Barca, Emanuele; Bruno, Delia Evelina; Passarella, Giuseppe

2016-07-01

Space-time dependencies among monitoring network stations have been investigated to detect and quantify similarity relationships among gauging stations. In this work, besides the well-known rank correlation index, two new similarity indices have been defined and applied to compute the similarity matrix related to the Apulian meteo-climatic monitoring network. The similarity matrices can be applied to address reliably the issue of missing data in space-time series. In order to establish the effectiveness of the similarity indices, a simulation test was then designed and performed with the aim of estimating missing monthly rainfall rates in a suitably selected gauging station. The results of the simulation allowed us to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed similarity indices. Finally, the multiple imputation by chained equations method was used as a benchmark to have an absolute yardstick for comparing the outcomes of the test. In conclusion, the new proposed multiplicative similarity index resulted at least as reliable as the selected benchmark.

A Model-Based Approach to Constructing Music Similarity Functions

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lamere Paul

2007-01-01

Full Text Available Several authors have presented systems that estimate the audio similarity of two pieces of music through the calculation of a distance metric, such as the Euclidean distance, between spectral features calculated from the audio, related to the timbre or pitch of the signal. These features can be augmented with other, temporally or rhythmically based features such as zero-crossing rates, beat histograms, or fluctuation patterns to form a more well-rounded music similarity function. It is our contention that perceptual or cultural labels, such as the genre, style, or emotion of the music, are also very important features in the perception of music. These labels help to define complex regions of similarity within the available feature spaces. We demonstrate a machine-learning-based approach to the construction of a similarity metric, which uses this contextual information to project the calculated features into an intermediate space where a music similarity function that incorporates some of the cultural information may be calculated.

A Model-Based Approach to Constructing Music Similarity Functions

Science.gov (United States)

West, Kris; Lamere, Paul

2006-12-01

Several authors have presented systems that estimate the audio similarity of two pieces of music through the calculation of a distance metric, such as the Euclidean distance, between spectral features calculated from the audio, related to the timbre or pitch of the signal. These features can be augmented with other, temporally or rhythmically based features such as zero-crossing rates, beat histograms, or fluctuation patterns to form a more well-rounded music similarity function. It is our contention that perceptual or cultural labels, such as the genre, style, or emotion of the music, are also very important features in the perception of music. These labels help to define complex regions of similarity within the available feature spaces. We demonstrate a machine-learning-based approach to the construction of a similarity metric, which uses this contextual information to project the calculated features into an intermediate space where a music similarity function that incorporates some of the cultural information may be calculated.

A Danish study of gender difference in scientific productivity

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Henriksen, Dorte

Several studies have shown that female researchers have a lower publication productivity and research performance, however a recent published study based on 852 researchers publication data from 2003-2005 (van Arensbergen et al. 2012) found that the performance difference has leveled out...... for the younger generation of researchers (196 men and 160 women) in the social sciences. The aim of this study is to investigate to what extend a similar tendency can be found among young female researchers in Denmark. Publication performance, in this study, is defined as the number of publications......), the present study shows that differences in publication performance between male and female researchers exist in Denmark. We find that when we compare research productivity among researchers in similar academic positions and in similar research areas, the male researchers still outperform their female...

Suppression of charmonium production in hadron gas

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Faustov, R.N.; Vasilevskaya, I.G.

1991-01-01

The problem of J/ψ charmonium production suppression under heavy ion collisions is investigated. The processes of charmonium disintegration in hadron gas are considered: π+J/ψ → π+c+c-bar and ρ+J/ψ → D+D. Based on the results obtained one can assume that charmonium disintegration contribution to J/ψ production suppression under collisions with gas hadrons and the contribution conditioned by the production of quark-gluon plasma, appear to be the effects of similar order of magnitude

Momentum transport process in the quasi self-similar region of free shear mixing layer

Science.gov (United States)

Takamure, K.; Ito, Y.; Sakai, Y.; Iwano, K.; Hayase, T.

2018-01-01

In this study, we performed a direct numerical simulation (DNS) of a spatially developing shear mixing layer covering both developing and developed regions. The aim of this study is to clarify the driving mechanism and the vortical structure of the partial counter-gradient momentum transport (CGMT) appearing in the quasi self-similar region. In the present DNS, the self-similarity is confirmed in x/L ≥ 0.67 (x/δU0 ≥ 137), where L and δU0 are the vertical length of the computational domain and the initial momentum thickness, respectively. However, the trend of CGMT is observed at around kδU = 0.075 and 0.15, where k is the wavenumber, δU is the normalized momentum thickness at x/L = 0.78 (x/δU0 = 160), and kδU = 0.075 corresponds to the distance between the vortical/stretching regions of the coherent structure. The budget analysis for the Reynolds shear stress reveals that it is caused by the pressure diffusion term at the off-central region and by -p (∂ u /∂ y ) ¯ in the pressure-strain correlation term at the central region. As the flow moves toward the downstream direction, the appearance of those terms becomes random and the unique trend of CGMT at the specific wavenumber bands disappears. Furthermore, we investigated the relationship between the CGMT and vorticity distribution in the vortex region of the mixing layer, in association with the spatial development. In the upstream location, the high-vorticity region appears in the boundary between the areas of gradient momentum transport and CGMT, although the high-vorticity region is not actively producing turbulence. The negative production area gradually spreads by flowing toward the downstream direction, and subsequently, the fluid mass with high-vorticity is transported from the forehead stretching region toward the counter-gradient direction. In this location, the velocity fluctuation in the high-vorticity region is large and turbulence is actively produced. In view of this, the trend of

Pythoscape: A framework for generation of large protein similarity networks

OpenAIRE

Babbitt, Patricia; Barber, AE; Babbitt, PC

2012-01-01

Pythoscape is a framework implemented in Python for processing large protein similarity networks for visualization in other software packages. Protein similarity networks are graphical representations of sequence, structural and other similarities among pr

characterization of inland-valleys for smallholder dairy production

African Journals Online (AJOL)

AISA

production des races d'animaux et l'absence de technologies de production ... MATERIAL AND METHODS ... to guide the choice of the proper t-test to use ... Table 1 : Distribution of the group leaders in relation to location, distances and ..... children. Similar observations were made in both Korhogo and Bouaké regions in.

Synthesis of Similars of the Retinoic Acid with Anti-Cancer Potential

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Marin Cordoba, R.

2001-01-01

Three precursors were synthesized in the route toward new structures similar of the retinoic acid. They are the bromocetones 15, 35 and 36. Two new similar of the retinoic acid were synthesized; they are the acids 39 and 40. The mechanism for the formation of 1,1,4,4-tetramethyl-1, 2,3,4-tetrahydronaphthalene (17), starting from benzene and 2,5-dimethyl-2, 5-dichlorine-hexane was studied. This reaction intended to be carried out in four elementary reactions. Under the used conditions, the product is isolated in 95%. Also, the effect of the dilution in the yield of the tetramethyltehydro-naphthalene was studied; the good relationship of benzene to the compound dichloride was of 29:1. It is determined that the bromocetones 15, 35 and 36 are little reactive toward the joining of Heck when the crotonic acid is used. Probably, the presence of the groups metoxyle and hydroxyle to the halogen in the bromocetones 15 and 36, respectively, affect the reactivity. In the case of the bromocetone 35, to make this reaction, the group protective acilo gets lost before being made the vinylation of Heck, becoming the bromocetone 36. The joining of Heck between the acrylic acid and the bromocetone 15 in an isolated yield of 33% was possible to be made. It indicates that besides the electronic effects that affect to the bromocetone in this type of reaction, the vinyllic methyl in the crotonic acid causes a low reactivity in this joining, for this substrate in particular. (Author) [es

Abundance estimation of spectrally similar minerals

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Debba, Pravesh

2009-07-01

Full Text Available This paper evaluates a spectral unmixing method for estimating the partial abundance of spectrally similar minerals in complex mixtures. The method requires formulation of a linear function of individual spectra of individual minerals. The first...

Biomass production efficiency controlled by management in temperate and boreal ecosystems

Science.gov (United States)

Campioli, M.; Vicca, S.; Luyssaert, S.; Bilcke, J.; Ceschia, E.; Chapin, F. S., III; Ciais, P.; Fernández-Martínez, M.; Malhi, Y.; Obersteiner, M.; Olefeldt, D.; Papale, D.; Piao, S. L.; Peñuelas, J.; Sullivan, P. F.; Wang, X.; Zenone, T.; Janssens, I. A.

2015-11-01

Plants acquire carbon through photosynthesis to sustain biomass production, autotrophic respiration and production of non-structural compounds for multiple purposes. The fraction of photosynthetic production used for biomass production, the biomass production efficiency, is a key determinant of the conversion of solar energy to biomass. In forest ecosystems, biomass production efficiency was suggested to be related to site fertility. Here we present a database of biomass production efficiency from 131 sites compiled from individual studies using harvest, biometric, eddy covariance, or process-based model estimates of production. The database is global, but dominated by data from Europe and North America. We show that instead of site fertility, ecosystem management is the key factor that controls biomass production efficiency in terrestrial ecosystems. In addition, in natural forests, grasslands, tundra, boreal peatlands and marshes, biomass production efficiency is independent of vegetation, environmental and climatic drivers. This similarity of biomass production efficiency across natural ecosystem types suggests that the ratio of biomass production to gross primary productivity is constant across natural ecosystems. We suggest that plant adaptation results in similar growth efficiency in high- and low-fertility natural systems, but that nutrient influxes under managed conditions favour a shift to carbon investment from the belowground flux of non-structural compounds to aboveground biomass.

HYPOTHESIS TESTING WITH THE SIMILARITY INDEX

Science.gov (United States)

Mulltilocus DNA fingerprinting methods have been used extensively to address genetic issues in wildlife populations. Hypotheses concerning population subdivision and differing levels of diversity can be addressed through the use of the similarity index (S), a band-sharing coeffic...

By-products by design

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Collins, Richard

2011-01-01

Full text: Some mining by-products that are currently stockpiled or disposed of could be put to use preventing nutrients from entering river systems, helping reduce the potential for algal blooms. A joint project between CSIRO and the Western Australia (WA) Department of Water investigated a range of spent materials from mining and industry to determine their ability to filter nutrients from natural waters or to treat wastewater. “The largely unexploited by-product materials we generate in Western Australia could be developed as 'designer' contaminant adsorbents,” said CSIRO project leader Dr Grant Douglas. The use of abundant, low-cost wastes generated from mineral processing, in particular, offers a potentially cost- effective and environmentally-friendly strategy for removing nutrients. “The productive use of the by-products also has the potential to reduce the environmental footprint of mining and mineral processing industries by lowering by-product stockpiles,” he said. But the key benefits are in water; not only improving the health of surface waters but, by facilitating reuse, also easing the competition for water resources in an increasingly climate constrained part of the country. Re-use of industrial by-products in WA is currently considered on a case-by-case basis rather than regulated according to established standards. The project aimed to inject some rigour by characterising for the first time the nutrient, trace element uptake and acid neutralising capacity of a range of low-cost by-products (see Fact File). It also underpinned the development of a draft protocol for screening similar by-products in the future. The comprehensive characterisation included identification and procurement, and basic characterisation of by-products included major and trace element geochemistry, mineralogy, radioactivity, geochemical modelling and leachate chemistry and toxicity. These inherent properties and suitability of by-products for potential environmental

Testicular cells exhibit similar molecular responses to cigarette smoke condensate ex vivo and in vivo.

Science.gov (United States)

Esakky, Prabagaran; Hansen, Deborah A; Drury, Andrea M; Felder, Paul; Cusumano, Andrew; Moley, Kelle H

2018-01-01

Male exposure to cigarette smoke is associated with seminal defects and with congenital anomalies and childhood cancers in offspring. In mice, paternal exposure to cigarette smoke condensate (CSC) causes molecular defects in germ cells and phenotypic effects in their offspring. Here we used an ex vivo testicular explant model and in vivo exposure to determine the concentration at which CSC impairs spermatogenesis and offspring development. We explanted testis tissue at postnatal day (P)5.5 and cultured it until P11.5. Assessment of growth parameters by analyzing expression of cell-specific markers revealed that the explant system maintained structural and functional integrity. We exposed the P5.5 to -11.5 explants to various concentrations (40-160 µg/ml) of CSC and confirmed that nicotine in the CSC was metabolized to cotinine. We assessed various growth and differentiation parameters, as well as testosterone production, and observed that many spermatogenesis features were impaired at 160 µg/ml CSC. The same parameters were impaired by a similar CSC concentration in vivo Finally, females mated to males that were exposed to 160 µg/ml CSC neonatally had increased rates of pup resorption. We conclude that male exposure to CSC impairs offspring development and that the concentration at which CSC impairs spermatogenesis is similar in vivo and ex vivo. Given that the concentrations of CSC we used contained similar doses of nicotine as human smokers are exposed to, we argue that our model mimics human male reproductive effects of smoking.-Esakky, P., Hansen, D. A., Drury, A. M., Felder, P., Cusumano, A., Moley, K. H. Testicular cells exhibit similar molecular responses to cigarette smoke condensate ex vivo and in vivo . © FASEB.

Similarity principles for equipment qualification by experience

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kana, D.D.; Pomerening, D.J.

1988-07-01

A methodology is developed for seismic qualification of nuclear plant equipment by applying similarity principles to existing experience data. Experience data are available from previous qualifications by analysis or testing, or from actual earthquake events. Similarity principles are defined in terms of excitation, equipment physical characteristics, and equipment response. Physical similarity is further defined in terms of a critical transfer function for response at a location on a primary structure, whose response can be assumed directly related to ultimate fragility of the item under elevated levels of excitation. Procedures are developed for combining experience data into composite specifications for qualification of equipment that can be shown to be physically similar to the reference equipment. Other procedures are developed for extending qualifications beyond the original specifications under certain conditions. Some examples for application of the procedures and verification of them are given for certain cases that can be approximated by a two degree of freedom simple primary/secondary system. Other examples are based on use of actual test data available from previous qualifications. Relationships of the developments with other previously-published methods are discussed. The developments are intended to elaborate on the rather broad revised guidelines developed by the IEEE 344 Standards Committee for equipment qualification in new nuclear plants. However, the results also contribute to filling a gap that exists between the IEEE 344 methodology and that previously developed by the Seismic Qualification Utilities Group. The relationship of the results to safety margin methodology is also discussed. (author)

Improved cosine similarity measures of simplified neutrosophic sets for medical diagnoses.

Science.gov (United States)

Ye, Jun

2015-03-01

In pattern recognition and medical diagnosis, similarity measure is an important mathematical tool. To overcome some disadvantages of existing cosine similarity measures of simplified neutrosophic sets (SNSs) in vector space, this paper proposed improved cosine similarity measures of SNSs based on cosine function, including single valued neutrosophic cosine similarity measures and interval neutrosophic cosine similarity measures. Then, weighted cosine similarity measures of SNSs were introduced by taking into account the importance of each element. Further, a medical diagnosis method using the improved cosine similarity measures was proposed to solve medical diagnosis problems with simplified neutrosophic information. The improved cosine similarity measures between SNSs were introduced based on cosine function. Then, we compared the improved cosine similarity measures of SNSs with existing cosine similarity measures of SNSs by numerical examples to demonstrate their effectiveness and rationality for overcoming some shortcomings of existing cosine similarity measures of SNSs in some cases. In the medical diagnosis method, we can find a proper diagnosis by the cosine similarity measures between the symptoms and considered diseases which are represented by SNSs. Then, the medical diagnosis method based on the improved cosine similarity measures was applied to two medical diagnosis problems to show the applications and effectiveness of the proposed method. Two numerical examples all demonstrated that the improved cosine similarity measures of SNSs based on the cosine function can overcome the shortcomings of the existing cosine similarity measures between two vectors in some cases. By two medical diagnoses problems, the medical diagnoses using various similarity measures of SNSs indicated the identical diagnosis results and demonstrated the effectiveness and rationality of the diagnosis method proposed in this paper. The improved cosine measures of SNSs based on cosine

Measurement of Similarity in Academic Contexts

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Omid Mahian

2017-06-01

Full Text Available We propose some reflections, comments and suggestions about the measurement of similar and matched content in scientific papers and documents, and the need to develop appropriate tools and standards for an ethically fair and equitable treatment of authors.

Development and quality characteristics of shelf-stable soy-agushie: a residual by-product of soymilk production.

Science.gov (United States)

Nti, Christina A; Plahar, Wisdom A; Annan, Nana T

2016-03-01

A process was developed for the production of a high-protein food ingredient, soy-agushie, from the residual by-product of soymilk production. The product, with a moisture content of about 6%, was evaluated for its quality characteristics and performance in traditional dishes. The protein content was about 26% with similar amino acids content as that of the whole soybean. Lysine remained high in the dehydrated product (6.57 g/16 g N). While over 60% of the original B vitamins content in the beans was extracted with the milk, high proportions of the minerals were found to be retained in the residual by-product. The process adequately reduced the trypsin inhibitor levels in the beans from 25 to 1.5 mg/g. High sensory scores were obtained for recipes developed with soy-agushie in traditional dishes. The scope of utilization of the soy-agushie could be widened to include several traditional foods and bakery products for maximum nutritional benefits.

Flexibility Study of a Liquid Food Production Process

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Cheng, Hongyuan; Friis, Alan

2006-01-01

Applying process engineering simulation method to model the processing of liquid food can provide a way to build a flexible food factory that can efficiently offer a wide range of tailored products in short delivery time. A milk production process, as an example, is simulated using a process...... engineering software to investigate the process operation conditions and flexibility. The established simulation method can be adapted to simulate similar liquid food production processes through suitable modifications....

Device for measuring fission product density

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kaneda, Mitsunori.

1980-01-01

Purpose: To determine the fission product density of xenon or the like and enable measurement of real time of fission product density in a reactor by calculating the disintegration and annihilation of the fission product on the basis of neutron detected output. Constitution: The neutron flux in a reactor is detected by a detector, and applied to first and second density calculators. Second fission product density signal of xenon or the like outputted from first device is again inputted to the device to form an annihilation signal due to disintegration to determine the present density of the second fission product of xenon or the like corresponding to the decrease of the neutron due to the poison of xeron or the like. Similarly, second device determines the first fission product density of iodine or the like. (Sekiya, K.)

Interpersonal Similarity and Knowledge Sharing within Multinational Organizations

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mäkelä, Kristiina; Andersson, Ulf; Seppälä, Tomi

2012-01-01

Previous research has established that interpersonal similarity can influence knowledge sharing in such a way that similar people are more likely to share knowledge than those who are dissimilar. We contribute to the literature by showing that in the MNC context, cultural and functional similarit....... These microfoundations of inter-unit knowledge exchange point to important theoretical and practical implications for international management....

Outsourced Similarity Search on Metric Data Assets

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Yiu, Man Lung; Assent, Ira; Jensen, Christian S.

2012-01-01

. Outsourcing offers the data owner scalability and a low initial investment. The need for privacy may be due to the data being sensitive (e.g., in medicine), valuable (e.g., in astronomy), or otherwise confidential. Given this setting, the paper presents techniques that transform the data prior to supplying......This paper considers a cloud computing setting in which similarity querying of metric data is outsourced to a service provider. The data is to be revealed only to trusted users, not to the service provider or anyone else. Users query the server for the most similar data objects to a query example...

Self-similar Langmuir collapse at critical dimension

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Berge, L.; Dousseau, Ph.; Pelletier, G.; Pesme, D.

1991-01-01

Two spherically symmetric versions of a self-similar collapse are investigated within the framework of the Zakharov equations, namely, one relative to a vectorial electric field and the other corresponding to a scalar modeling of the Langmuir field. Singular solutions of both of them depend on a linear time contraction rate ξ(t) = V(t * -t), where t * and V = -ξ denote, respectively, the collapse time and the constant collapse velocity. It is shown that under certain conditions, only the scalar model admits self-similar solutions, varying regularly as a function of the control parameter V from the subsonic (V >1) regime. (author)

The efficiency of similarity-focused comparisons in person perception.

Science.gov (United States)

Corcoran, Katja

2013-01-01

Comparison processes are ubiquitous in person perception. Comparative thinking can follow two routes: People either search for similarities or for dissimilarities while comparing. Which of these two routes is more efficient? Previous research indicates that people could compare two geometrical figures faster if they focused on similarities rather than dissimilarities. I examine comparisons of people and measure the consumption of cognitive resources as indicator for efficiency. The results confirm an efficiency-advantage of similarity-focused comparisons for social stimuli.

Nuclear material production cycle vulnerability analysis

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bott, T.F.

1996-01-01

This paper discusses a method for rapidly and systematically identifying vulnerable equipment in a nuclear material or similar production process and ranking that equipment according to its attractiveness to a malevolent attacker. A multistep approach was used in the analysis. First, the entire production cycle was modeled as a flow diagram. This flow diagram was analyzed using graph theoretical methods to identify processes in the production cycle and their locations. Models of processes that were judged to be particularly vulnerable based on the cycle analysis then were developed in greater detail to identify equipment in that process that is vulnerable to intentional damage

Production of dissolved organic carbon in aquatic sediment suspensions

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Koelmans, A.A.; Prevo, L.

2003-01-01

In many water quality models production of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is modelled as mineralisation from particulate organic matter (POM). In this paper it is argued that the DOC production from dessicated sediments by water turbulence may be of similar importance
In many water quality

In-use product stocks link manufactured capital to natural capital.

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Wei-Qiang; Graedel, T E

2015-05-19

In-use stock of a product is the amount of the product in active use. In-use product stocks provide various functions or services on which we rely in our daily work and lives, and the concept of in-use product stock for industrial ecologists is similar to the concept of net manufactured capital stock for economists. This study estimates historical physical in-use stocks of 91 products and 9 product groups and uses monetary data on net capital stocks of 56 products to either approximate or compare with in-use stocks of the corresponding products in the United States. Findings include the following: (i) The development of new products and the buildup of their in-use stocks result in the increase in variety of in-use product stocks and of manufactured capital; (ii) substitution among products providing similar or identical functions reflects the improvement in quality of in-use product stocks and of manufactured capital; and (iii) the historical evolution of stocks of the 156 products or product groups in absolute, per capita, or per-household terms shows that stocks of most products have reached or are approaching an upper limit. Because the buildup, renewal, renovation, maintenance, and operation of in-use product stocks drive the anthropogenic cycles of materials that are used to produce products and that originate from natural capital, the determination of in-use product stocks together with modeling of anthropogenic material cycles provides an analytic perspective on the material linkage between manufactured capital and natural capital.

The importance of product definitions in US e-cigarette laws and regulations.

Science.gov (United States)

Lempert, Lauren K; Grana, Rachel; Glantz, Stanton A

2016-04-01

How electronic cigarettes and similar products (e-cigarettes) are defined affects how they are regulated, particularly whether existing laws for cigarettes apply, including sales and marketing, youth access, smoke-free and taxation laws. We examined the text of 46 bills that define e-cigarettes enacted in 40 states and characterised how e-cigarettes and similar products were defined. States enact laws creating new product categories for e-cigarettes separate from the 'tobacco product' category (eg, 'alternative nicotine product,' 'vapour product,' 'electronic nicotine device'), with four states explicitly excluding e-cigarettes from 'tobacco products.' Twenty-eight states do not include e-cigarettes in their definitions of 'tobacco products' or 'smoking,' eight include e-cigarettes as 'tobacco products,' three include e-cigarettes in 'smoking.' Sixteen states' definitions of e-cigarettes require nicotine, and five states pre-empt more stringent local laws. Tobacco and e-cigarette industry representatives tried to shape laws that benefit their interests. Definitions separating e-cigarettes from other tobacco products are common. Similar to past 'Trojan horse' policies, e-cigarette policies that initially appear to restrict sales (eg, limit youth access) may actually undermine regulation if they establish local pre-emption or create definitions that divide e-cigarettes from other tobacco products. Comparable issues are raised by the European Union Tobacco Products Directive and e-cigarette regulations in other countries. Policymakers should carefully draft legislation with definitions of e-cigarettes that broadly define the products, do not require nicotine or tobacco, do not pre-empt stronger regulations and explicitly include e-cigarettes in smoke-free and taxation laws. Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://www.bmj.com/company/products-services/rights-and-licensing/

How to Analyze and Quantify Similarities between Configured Engineer-To-Order Products by Comparing the Highlighted Features Utilizing the Configuration System Abilities

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Shafiee, Sara; Hvam, Lars; Kristjansdottir, Katrin

2015-01-01

Engineering-To-Order (ETO) companies making complex and highly engineered products, face the challenge of delivering highly customized and engineered products with high quality and short delivery time. In order to respond to those challenges ETO companies strive to increase commonality between......, materials used, and hours used in the workshop. The aim of this paper is to make a framework for setting up a database before starting the comparison....

Cross-kingdom similarities in microbiome functions

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Mendes, R.; Raaijmakers, J.M.

2015-01-01

Recent advances in medical research have revealed how humans rely on their microbiome for diverse traits and functions. Similarly, microbiomes of other higher organisms play key roles in disease, health, growth and development of their host. Exploring microbiome functions across kingdoms holds

Efficient Similarity Retrieval in Music Databases

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Ruxanda, Maria Magdalena; Jensen, Christian Søndergaard

2006-01-01

Audio music is increasingly becoming available in digital form, and the digital music collections of individuals continue to grow. Addressing the need for effective means of retrieving music from such collections, this paper proposes new techniques for content-based similarity search. Each music...