Evaluation of rapeseed meals in broiler chicks: Effect of iodine supply and glucosinolate degradation by myrosinase or copper

In rapeseed meals (RSM) of a conventional (c) or a newly bred (n) variety 117 or 44 mmol glucosinolates and glucosinolate degradation products per kg dry matter were detected. Soaking meals in aqueous myrosinase or copper sulphate solution and subsequent drying reduced the content of antinutrients by more than 90%. Broiler chickens were fed (i) a glucosinolate-free diet, or this diet in which half the soybean meal was replaced by RSM of various origins and treatment; (ii) untreated cRSM; (iii) cRSM treated with myrosinase: (iv) cRSM treated with Cu (v) untreated nRSM; or (vi) nRSM treated with myrosinase. These diets were administered with or without supplementary iodine. Chickens receiving the iodine-deficient diets with myrosinase-treated RSM showed growth depression, incomplete feathering, leg injuries and severe goitre. In the serum T⁴ could not be detected. Giving myrosinase-treated RSM plus iodine, or giving other RSM diets irrespective of iodine administration, no growth depression was observed. RSM diets without iodine dosage markedly increased thyroid weight: there were no differences between the RSM variants. In contrast to the treatment with myrosinase, in the sera of the chickens fed on untreated RSM or RSM treated with copper T⁴ could be detected, suggesting that in iodine-deficient conditions differences in serum T⁴ concentration between RSM groups indicate a differing anti-thyroid activity. With iodine supplementation the RSM had a significant effect on thyroid weight. The largest thyroids (five-fold heavier) were in the animals with myrosinase-treated cRSM. The untreated cRSM and the nRSM trebled or doubled the thyroid weight, and the myrosinase-treated nRSM trebled it. The thyroid weight of chicks fed cRSM treated with copper did not differ significantly from the glucosinolate-free control. There was evidence that heating the myrosinase-treated RMS produced anti-thyroid compounds; these should be identified in further investigations.     

A polynomial factorization approach to the discrete time GI/G/1/(N) queue size distribution

The queue of a single server is considered with independent and identically distributed interarrivai and service times and an infinite (GI/G/1) or finite (GI/G/1/N) waiting room. The queue discipline is non-preemptive and independent of the service times.

A discrete time version of the system is analyzed, using a two-component state model at the arrival and departure instants of customers. The equilibrium equations are solved by a polynomial factorization method. The steady state distribution of the queue size is then represented as a linear combination of geometrical series, whose parameters are evaluated by closed formulae depending on the roots of a characteristic polynomial.

Considering modified boundary constraints, systems with finite waiting room or with an exceptional first service in each busy period are included.     

Some Notes on the Formal Properties of Bidirectional Optimality Theory

In this paper, we discuss some formal properties of the model ofbidirectional Optimality Theory that was developed inBlutner (2000). We investigate the conditions under whichbidirectional optimization is a well-defined notion, and we give aconceptually simpler reformulation of Blutner's definition. In thesecond part of the paper, we show that bidirectional optimization can bemodeled by means of finite state techniques. There we rely heavily onthe related work of Frank and Satta (1998) about unidirectionaloptimization.     

Graffiti: graph-based classification in heterogeneous networks

We address the problem of multi-label classification in heterogeneous graphs, where nodes belong to different types and different types have different sets of classification labels. We present a novel approach that aims to classify nodes based on their neighborhoods. We model the mutual influence of nodes as a random walk in which the random surfer aims at distributing class labels to nodes while walking through the graph. When viewing class labels as “colors”, the random surfer is essentially spraying different node types with different color palettes; hence the name Graffiti of our method. In contrast to previous work on topic-based random surfer models, our approach captures and exploits the mutual influence of nodes of the same type based on their connections to nodes of other types. We show important properties of our algorithm such as convergence and scalability. We also confirm the practical viability of Graffiti by an experimental study on subsets of the popular social networks Flickr and LibraryThing. We demonstrate the superiority of our approach by comparing it to three other state-of-the-art techniques for graph-based classification.     

Provably correct and complete transaction rules for updating 3D city models

The shapes of our cities change very frequently. These changes have to be reflected in data sets representing urban objects. However, it must be assured that frequent updates do not affect geometric-topological consistency. This important aspect of spatial data quality guarantees essential assumptions on which users and applications of 3D city models rely: viz. that objects do not intersect, overlap or penetrate mutually, or completely cover one another. This raises the question how to guarantee that geometric-topological consistency is preserved when data sets are updated. Hence, there is a certain risk that plans and decisions which are based on these data sets are erroneous and that the tremendous efforts spent for data acquisition and updates become vain. In this paper, we solve this problem by presenting efficient transaction rules for updating 3D city models. These rules guarantee that geometric-topological consistency is preserved (Safety) and allow for the generation of arbitrary consistent 3D city models (Completeness). Safety as well as completeness is proven with mathematical rigor, guaranteeing the reliability of our method. Our method is applicable to 3D city models, which define—besides the terrain surface—complex spatial objects like buildings with rooms and storeys as interior structures, as well as bridges and tunnels. Those objects are represented as aggregations of solids, and their surfaces are complex from a topology point of view. 3D GIS models like CityGML, which are widely used to represent cities, provide the means to define semantics, geometry and topology, but do not address the problem of maintaining consistency. Hence, our approach complements CityGML.     

A fast audio similarity retrieval method for millions of music tracks

We present a filter-and-refine method to speed up nearest neighbor searches with the Kullback–Leibler divergence for multivariate Gaussians. This combination of features and similarity estimation is of special interest in the field of automatic music recommendation as it is widely used to compute music similarity. However, the non-vectorial features and a non-metric divergence make using it with large corpora difficult, as standard indexing algorithms can not be used. This paper proposes a method for fast nearest neighbor retrieval in large databases which relies on the above approach. In its core the method rescales the divergence and uses a modified FastMap implementation to speed up nearest-neighbor queries. Overall the method accelerates the search for similar music pieces by a factor of 10–30 and yields high recall values of 95–99% compared to a standard linear search.     

Liver Lipids of Patients with Hepatitis B and C and Associated Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) still remains a difficult to cure malignancy. In recent years, the focus has shifted to lipid metabolism for the treatment of HCC. Very little is known about hepatitis B virus (HBV) and C virus (HCV)-related hepatic lipid disturbances in non-malignant and cancer tissues. The present study showed that triacylglycerol and cholesterol concentrations were similar in tumor adjacent HBV and HCV liver, and were not induced in the HCC tissues. Higher levels of free cholesterol, polyunsaturated phospholipids and diacylglycerol species were noted in non-tumorous HBV compared to HCV liver. Moreover, polyunsaturated phospholipids and diacylglycerols, and ceramides declined in tumors of HBV infected patients. All of these lipids remained unchanged in HCV-related HCC. In HCV tumors, polyunsaturated phosphatidylinositol levels were even induced. There were no associations of these lipid classes in non-tumor tissues with hepatic inflammation and fibrosis scores. Moreover, these lipids did not correlate with tumor grade or T-stage in HCC tissues. Lipid reprogramming of the three analysed HBV/HCV related tumors mostly resembled HBV-HCC. Indeed, lipid composition of non-tumorous HCV tissue, HCV tumors, HBV tumors and HBV/HCV tumors was highly similar. The tumor suppressor protein p53 regulates lipid metabolism. The p53 and p53S392 protein levels were induced in the tumors of HBV, HCV and double infected patients, and this was significant in HBV infection. Negative correlation of tumor p53 protein with free cholesterol indicates a role of p53 in cholesterol metabolism. In summary, the current study suggests that therapeutic strategies to target lipid metabolism in chronic viral hepatitis and associated cancers have to consider disease etiology.