Manipulation of dietary short chain carbohydrates alters the pattern of gas production and genesis of symptoms in irritable bowel syndrome

Background and Aim:  Reduction of short-chain poorly absorbed carbohydrates (FODMAPs) in the diet reduces symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). In the present study, we aimed to compare the patterns of breath hydrogen and methane and symptoms produced in response to diets that differed only in FODMAP content.
Methods:  Fifteen healthy subjects and 15 with IBS (Rome III criteria) undertook a single-blind, crossover intervention trial involving consuming provided diets that were either low (9 g/day) or high (50 g/day) in FODMAPs for 2 days. Food and gastrointestinal symptom diaries were kept and breath samples collected hourly over 14 h on day 2 of each diet.
Results:  Higher levels of breath hydrogen were produced over the entire day with the high FODMAP diet for healthy volunteers (181 ± 77 ppm.14 h vs 43 ± 18; mean ± SD P < 0.0001) and patients with IBS (242 ± 79 vs 62 ± 23; P < 0.0001), who had higher levels during each dietary period than the controls (P < 0.05). Breath methane, produced by 10 subjects within each group, was reduced with the high FODMAP intake in healthy subjects (47 ± 29 vs 109 ± 77; P = 0.043), but was not different in patients with IBS (126 ± 153 vs 86 ± 72). Gastrointestinal symptoms and lethargy were significantly induced by the high FODMAP diet in patients with IBS, while only increased flatus production was reported by healthy volunteers.
Conclusions:  Dietary FODMAPs induce prolonged hydrogen production in the intestine that is greater in IBS, influence the amount of methane produced, and induce gastrointestinal and systemic symptoms experienced by patients with IBS. The results offer mechanisms underlying the efficacy of the low FODMAP diet in IBS.

A hermeneutic study of pattern mining as a knowledge creation process : exploring multimedia design practices

In this paper, we discuss a special case of knowledge creation via pattern mining that was studied using a hermeneutic approach. The reported study explores the nature of knowledge creation by domain practitioners who do not communicate directly. The focus of this paper extends the traditional view of a knowledge creation process beyond organisational boundaries. The proposed knowledge creation framework explains the facilitated process of knowledge creation by its qualification, combination, socialisation, externalisation, internalisation and introspection, thus allowing the transformation of individual experience and knowledge into formalised shareable domain knowledge.

Wry-necked memory : the matter of Ireland in cutting green hay and memory Ireland, and the poems of the pattern.

This paper examines the matter of Ireland in Buckley’s two memoirs, Cutting Green Hay (1983) and Memory Ireland (1985), and the poems of The Pattern (1979), in order to revisit critically the ways in which he constructs himself as a diasporic Irish-Australian, a participant in the most remote Gaeltacht. It raises questions of victimhood, of similar and different experience of being at the mercy of the land, and of his re-engineering of the place of the political in poetry. It argues that Buckley’s agonized positioning as Ireland’s ‘guest/foreigner/son’ was a project that was doomed by its utopianism, and that, obsessed as he became with Ireland, the angst within had little to do with ‘the Ireland within’ or without. The paper suggests that the poet’s slow and unacknowledged abandonment in his Irish period of a key tenet of modernism, its distrust of propaganda and the political, is in itself a new formation which had some continuity with the radicalism of his thinking during the formative years of the revolutionary catholic apostolate he led both at the University of Melbourne and nationally. It also points to the deployment of an ancient medieval Irish trope, that of the ocean (rather than a landmass) linking a dispersed community, as one of the ways the poetry effects a resolution of the issues of being ‘Irish’ in a remote country.

The identification of mammalian species through the classification of hair patterns using image pattern recognition

The identification of mammals through the use of their hair is important in the fields of forensics and ecology. The application of computer pattern recognition techniques to this process provides a means of reducing the subjectivity found in the process, as manual techniques rely on the interpretation of a human expert rather than quantitative measures. The first application of image pattern recognition techniques to the classification of African mammalian species using hair patterns is presented. This application uses a 2D Gabor filter-bank and motivates the use of moments to classify hair scale patterns. Application of a 2D Gabor filter-bank to hair scale processing provides results of 52% accuracy when using a filter bank of size four and 72% accuracy when using a filter-bank of size eight. These initial results indicate that 2D Gabor filters produce information that may be successfully

Data with abnormal shift pattern in a manufacturing process

The data represents a shift in process variable presented in a control chart due to the sudden change in the machine setting.

Data with abnormal trend pattern in a manufacturing process

The data represents a trend in a deteriorating process caused by gradually increasing material variability and deteriorations of operator skills or loosening fixtures.

Data with abnormal cyclic pattern in a manufacturing process

The data represents a cyclic pattern in process variable presented in a control chart due to periodic rotation of operators, seasonal or environmental changes.

Data with abnormal systematic pattern in a manufacturing process

The data represents a systematic pattern in process variable presented in a control chart due to measurement gauge rotation and power fluctuations in manufacturing processes.

Analysing the transmission pattern within the framework of housing supply and monetary policy in Australia

Housing supply is one of important components of the housing sector. Compared with an increasingly strong housing demand, the growth rates of total housing stock in Australia have exhibited a downward trend since the end of the 1990s whilst the significant adjustments in the Australian monetary policy were being implemented. This research aims to estimate the nature of the relationship between housing supply and monetary policy by a vector error correction model. According to the empirical results, a transmission pattern comprised of the indicators associated with housing supply and monetary policy can be identified, which suggests that there is a significant interrelationship between monetary policy and the supply side of the housing sector in Australia.

Driver recognition based on dynamic handgrip pattern on steeling wheel

This paper proposes a novel biometric authentication method based on the recognition of drivers' dynamic handgrip on steering wheel. A pressure sensitive mat mounted on a steering wheel is employed to collect handgrip data exerted by the hands of drivers who intend to start the vehicle. Then, the likelihood-ratio-based classifier is designed to distinguish rightful driver of a car after analyzing their inherent dynamic features of grasping. The experimental results obtained in this study show that mean acceptance rates of 85.4% for the trained subjects and mean rejection rates of 82.65% for the un-trained ones are achieved by the classifier in the two batches of testing. It can be concluded that the driver verification approach based on dynamic handgrip recognition on steering wheel is a promising biometric technology and will be further explored in the near future in smart car design.