A Review of the Nutrition Claims Made by Proponents of Organic Food.

  Health-conscious consumers have an interest in knowing if the extra money they spend on organic food is justified. The organic food industry, therefore, has a large financial interest in convincing the public that the food they sell is healthier, tastier, and better for the environment. One area that the industry has concentrated on is the supposed nutritional superiority of their product.

The "hour of pink twilight": lesbian poetics and queer encounters on the fin-de-siècle street.

This essay examines the cultural representation of women's encounters on the fin-de-siècle street and, in particular, the uncertainties that clustered around the possibilities of mutual, or one-sided, same-sex desire accompanying such meetings. It argues, through an examination of lyric poetry, paintings, and short fiction, for the usefulness of twilight--a time of shadowy ambiguity--as a trope to suggest these uncertainities. More than this, it maintains that the lyric and the developing genre of the short story were modes ideally suited to an invocation of the fluid, the uncertain, and the unnamable.

Reflections on Darwin and Darwinizing.

Although there is a vast literature about Darwin there remains an urgent need, particularly in the field of literary studies, for greater understanding of his work. This essay examines current trends in Darwinian criticism, contrasting Literary Darwinism--which seeks in literature the "human nature" being defined by evolutionary psychology--with other models of Darwinian criticism provided by historians of science and literary scholars, models that bring together a sense of historical context with original attention to form and language. Such attention points toward future work that might alter our understanding of Darwin's achievement, both as scientist and writer, and thus change our sense of the affective implications of the world he represents.

Dedicated finite elements for electrode thin films on quartz resonators.

The accuracy of the finite element analysis for thickness shear quartz resonators is a function of the mesh resolution; the finer the mesh resolution, the more accurate the finite element solution. A certain minimum number of elements are required in each direction for the solution to converge. This places a high demand on memory for computation, and often the available memory is insufficient.

Automatic image analysis of histopathology specimens using concave vertex graph.

Automatic image analysis of histopathology specimens would help the early detection of blood cancer. The first step for automatic image analysis is segmentation. However, touching cells bring the difficulty for traditional segmentation algorithms.

On generating FC(3) fuzzy rule systems from data using evolution strategies.

Sophisticated fuzzy rule systems are supposed to be flexible, complete, consistent and compact (FC(3)). Flexibility, and consistency are essential for fuzzy systems to exhibit an excellent performance and to have a clear physical meaning, while compactness is crucial when the number of the input variables increases. However, the completeness and consistency conditions are often violated if a fuzzy system is generated from data collected from real world applications.

Giant electrostrictive response in poly(vinylidene fluoride-hexafluoropropylene) copolymers.

Electrostrictive strains were measured in three different polymeric materials: a low modulus polyurethane elastomer, previously studied by Scheinbeim et al. (1994), and two higher modulus random copolymers of poly(vinylidene fluoride-hexafluoropropylene) [P(VDF-HFP)] with 5% and 15% HFP content. Measurements at increasing voltage (electric fields ranging from 0 to 60 MV/m) were taken using an air gap capacitance system and then converted to sample thickness.

Electrostrictive properties of nanosize PbTiO(3).

Properties of nanosize PbTiO(3) are discussed from the standpoint of the effects of crystallite size on electrostrictive behavior. Experimental results based on crystallite size-dependent primary and secondary order parameters (spontaneous polarization and strain) show that the critical crystallite size (CCS) for the stabilization of the cubic paraelectric phase at 298 K is around 15 nm. The CCS inversely scales with the cubic-tetragonal transition temperature (T(tr)).

High throughput analysis of breast cancer specimens on the grid.

Breast cancer accounts for about 30% of all cancers and 15% of all cancer deaths in women in the United States. Advances in computer assisted diagnosis (CAD) holds promise for early detecting and staging disease progression. In this paper we introduce a Grid-enabled CAD to perform automatic analysis of imaged histopathology breast tissue specimens.

Detecting prostatic adenocarcinoma from digitized histology using a multi-scale hierarchical classification approach.

In this paper we present a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system to automatically detect prostatic adenocarcinoma from high resolution digital histopathological slides. This is especially desirable considering the large number of tissue slides that are currently analyzed manually - a laborious and time-consuming task. Our methodology is novel in that texture-based classification is performed using a hierarchical classifier within a multi-scale framework.

Distinguishing lesions from posterior acoustic shadowing in breast ultrasound via non-linear dimensionality reduction.

Breast ultrasound (US) in conjunction with digital mammography has come to be regarded as the gold standard for breast cancer diagnosis. While breast US has certain advantages over digital mammography, it suffers from image artifacts such as posterior acoustic shadowing (PAS), presence of which often obfuscates lesion margins. Since classification of lesions as either malignant or benign is largely dictated by lesion's shape and margin characteristics, it is important to distinguish lesion area from PAS.

An automatic method for ground glass opacity nodule detection and segmentation from CT studies.

Ground glass opacity (GGO) is defined as hazy increased attenuation within a lung that is not associated with obscured underlying vessels. Since pure (non-solid) or mixed (partially solid) GGO at the thin-section CT are more likely to be malignant than those with solid opacity, early detection and treatment of GGO can improve a prognosis of lung cancer. However, due to indistinct boundaries and inter-or intra-observer variation, consistent manual detection and segmentation of GGO have proved to be problematic.

A boosting cascade for automated detection of prostate cancer from digitized histology.

Current diagnosis of prostatic adenocarcinoma is done by manual analysis of biopsy tissue samples for tumor presence. However, the recent advent of whole slide digital scanners has made histopathological tissue specimens amenable to computer-aided diagnosis (CAD). In this paper, we present a CAD system to assist pathologists by automatically detecting prostate cancer from digitized images of prostate histological specimens.

Inflammatory Process and Molecular Targets for Antiinflammatory Nutraceuticals.

Intense interest in nutraceuticals and their potential benefits has created the need to review the existing scientific information on their effect in preventing and managing inflammation that accompanies most chronic diseases. This article reviews the basic mechanisms of inflammation and the potential of 9 nutraceuticals to be effective as chronic disease preventive agents. Furthermore, the article emphasizes studies in which nutraceuticals are shown to be effective in preventing inflammation and mentions other molecular targets that can be of use in the future.

Acetaminophen and myocardial infarction in dogs.

The hypothesis that acetaminophen can reduce necrosis during myocardial infarction was tested in male dogs. Two groups were studied: vehicle- (n=10) and acetaminophen-treated (n=10) dogs. All dogs were obtained from the same vendor, and there were no significant differences in their ages (18 +/- 2 mo), weights (24 +/- 1 kg), or housing conditions.

Nucleation and Expansion During Extrusion and Microwave Heating of Cereal Foods.

Expansion of biopolymer matrices is the basis for the production of a wide variety of cereal foods. A limited number of manufacturing processes provide practical solutions for the development of an impressive variety of expanded products, just by changing process variables. It is therefore essential that the mechanisms involved in expansion are well known and controlled.

Role of p55 tumor necrosis factor receptor 1 in acetaminophen-induced antioxidant defense.

Tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha is a macrophage-derived proinflammatory cytokine implicated in hepatotoxicity. In the present studies, p55 TNF receptor 1 (TNFR1) -/- mice were used to assess the role of TNF-alpha in acetaminophen-induced antioxidant defense. Treatment of wild-type (WT) mice with acetaminophen (300 mg/kg) resulted in centrilobular hepatic necrosis and increased serum alanine transaminases.

Species and Nitrogen Effect on Growth Rate, Tiller Density, and Botanical Composition in Grass Hay Production.

Numerous studies have evaluated growth, stand dynamics, and botanical composition of grass swards separately, but little information is available on the interaction of these factors. The objectives of this study were to determine the response of growth rate, tiller density, and botanical composition in orchardgrass (Dactylis glomerata L.), smooth bromegrass (Bromus inermis Leyss.

Genetic Improvement in Short-Season Soybeans: II. Nitrogen Accumulation, Remobilization, and Partitioning.

Genetic improvement in yield is conditional on surmounting yield-limiting factors. Nitrogen (N) has been considered an important limiting factor to soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.

A human vision based computational model for chromatic texture segregation.

We have developed a computational model for texture perception which has physiological relevance and correlates well with human performance. The model attempts to simulate the visual processing characteristics by incorporating mechanisms tuned to detect luminance-polarity, orientation, spatial frequency and color, which are characteristic features of any textural image. We obtained a very good correlation between the model's simulation results and data from psychophysical experiments with a systematically selected set of visual stimuli with texture patterns defined by spatial variations in color, luminance, and orientation.

Numerical algorithms and results for SC-cut quartz plates vibrating at the third harmonic overtone of thickness shear.

Finite element matrix equations, derived from two-dimensional piezoelectric high frequency plate theory are solved to study the vibrational behavior of the third overtone of thickness shear in square and circular SC-cut quartz resonators. The mass-loading and electric effects of electrodes are included. A perturbation method which reduces the memory requirements and computational time significantly is employed to calculate the piezoelectric resonant frequencies.

Silicon models of lateral inhibition.

The neurological process known as lateral inhibition (LI) has long been acknowledged as a critical operation for the preprocessing many types of sensory stimuli. In the mammalian retina, LI is utilized to enhance visual images by performing differential amplification on the pixels from which the image is composed. In this study, LI is implemented using VLSI-based models.

A perturbation method for finite element modeling of piezoelectric vibrations in quartz plate resonators.

When the piezoelectric stiffening matrix is added to the mechanical stiffness matrix of a finite element model, its sparse matrix structure is destroyed. A direct consequence of this loss in sparseness is a significant rise in memory and computational time requirements for the model. For weakly coupled piezoelectric materials, the matrix sparseness can be retained by a perturbation method which separates the mechanical eigenvalue solution from its piezoelectric effects.