Qualidade de uvas de mesa procedentes do Banco Ativo de Germoplasma da Embrapa Semiárido.

A região do Submédio do Vale do São Francisco, cujas principais cidades produtoras são Petrolina, em Pernambuco, e Juazeiro, na Bahia, destaca-se na produção de uvas sob condições tropicais no Brasil. As condições climáticas da região permitem a realização de 2,5 ciclos vegetativos/ano e a programação da época de colheita para qualquer dia do ano, o que possibilita a oferta constante de uvas de mesa no mercado e o processamento de grandes volumes da fruta ao longo do ano (PROTAS; CAMARGO, 2011). O mercado brasileiro de uvas de mesa exige cada vez por qualidade, que, em geral, é avaliada com base nos seguintes parâmetros: ausência de manchas, lesões e ferimentos; turgidez do engaço; consistência da polpa; condição microbiológica e 18 entomológica; cor, sabor e formato característicos (LIMA, 2013). Por isso, a indicação de genótipos promissores ao cultivo em determinada região requer ampla caracterização e avaliação da planta e os frutos que produz. Desta forma, o objetivo do presente trabalho foi avaliar as características de qualidade de uvas tintas de mesa, conservadas no Banco Ativo de Germoplasma (BAG) da Embrapa Semiárido.

Produção e características físico-químicas dos frutos de novas cultivares de uvas de mesa sobre diferentes porta-enxertos no Vale do Submédio São Francisco.

A importância da utilização de porta-enxertos na viticultura mundial é amplamente conhecida, especialmente no que se refere a sua influência na absorção de água e adaptação adiferentes tipos de solos, resistência a doenças e na produção das cultivares copa. O porta-enxerto ideal para as condições semiáridas brasileiras deve reunir características como vigor, resistência a pragas, doenças, e principalmente aos nematóides que estão presentes nos solos arenosos desta região (LEÃO et al., 2009). Apesar da recente diversificação da viticultura e introdução de novas cultivares de uvas de mesa no Vale do Submédio São Francisco, estudos que permitam a identificação dos melhores porta-enxertos, anteriores ao estabelecimento comercial dessas novas cultivares, geralmente não são realizados. A utilização de porta-enxertos adequados para cada cultivar copa são necessários porque permitem que as videiras expressem a sua máxima capacidade produtiva e qualidade das uvas. O objetivo do presente trabalho foi avaliar a influência do porta-enxerto sobre a produção e características dos frutos de novas cultivares de uvas de mesa no Vale do Submédio São Francisco.

A parametric analysis technique for design of fuel cell and hybrid-electric vehicles

This paper presents a new simplified parametric analysis technique for the design of fuel cell and hybrid-electric vehicles. The technique utilizes a comprehensive set of ∼30 parameters to fully characterize the vehicle platform, powertrain components, vehicle performance requirements and driving conditions. It is best applied to the sizing of powertrain components and prediction of energy consumption in a vehicle. This new parametric technique makes a good complement to existing vehicle simulation software packages and therefore represents a potentially valuable tool for the hybrid vehicle designer.

Hydrotherapy as a recovery strategy after exercise: A pragmatic controlled trial

Background Our aim was to evaluate the recovery effects of hydrotherapy after aerobic exercise in cardiovascular, performance and perceived fatigue. Methods A pragmatic controlled repeated measures; single-blind trial was conducted. Thirty-four recreational sportspeople visited a Sport-Centre and were assigned to a Hydrotherapy group (experimental) or rest in a bed (control) after completing a spinning session. Main outcomes measures including blood pressure, heart rate, handgrip strength, vertical jump, self-perceived fatigue, and body temperature were assessed at baseline, immediately post-exercise and post-recovery. The hypothesis of interest was the session*time interaction. Results The analysis revealed significant session*time interactions for diastolic blood pressure (P=0.031), heart rate (P=0.041), self perceived fatigue (P=0.046), and body temperature (P=0.001); but not for vertical jump (P=0.437), handgrip (P=0.845) or systolic blood pressure (P=0.266). Post-hoc analysis revealed that hydrotherapy resulted in recovered heart rate and diastolic blood pressure similar to baseline values after the spinning session. Further, hydrotherapy resulted in decreased self-perceived fatigue after the spinning session. Conclusions Our results support that hydrotherapy is an adequate strategy to facilitate cardiovascular recovers and perceived fatigue, but not strength, after spinning exercise. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT01765387 Keywords: Hydrotherapy; Heart rate; Fatigue; Strength; Blood pressure; Body temperature

Validation and reliability of a Spanish version of Simple Shoulder Test (SST-Sp)

Background: The Simple Shoulder Test (SST-Sp) is a widely used outcome measure. Objective: The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a Spanish-version SST (SST-Sp). Methods: A two-stage observational study was conducted. The SST was initially cross-culturally adapted to Spanish through double forward and backward translation and then validated for its psychometric characteristics. Participants (n = 66) with several shoulder disorders completed the SST-Sp, DASH, VAS and SF-12. The full sample was employed to determine factor structure, internal consistency and concurrent criterion validity. Reliability was determined in the first 24–48 h in a subsample of 21 patients. Results: The SST-Sp showed three factors that explained the 56.1 % of variance, and the internal consistency for each factor was α = 0.738, 0.723 and 0.667, and reliability was ICC = 0.687–0.944. The factor structure was three-dimensional and supported construct validity. Criterion validity determined from the relationship between the SST-Sp and DASH was strong (r = −0.73; p < 0.001) and fair for VAS (r = −0.537; p < 0.001). Relationships between SST-Sp and SF-12 were weak for both physical (r = −0.47; p < 0.001) and mental (r = −0.43; p < 0.001) dimensions. Conclusions: The SST-Sp supports the findings of the original English version as being a valid shoulder outcome measure with similar psychometric properties to the original English version.

Comparison of the degree of creativity in the design outcomes using different design methods

This work analyses the influence of several design methods on the degree of creativity of the design outcome. A design experiment has been carried out in which the participants were divided into four teams of three members, and each team was asked to work applying different design methods. The selected methods were Brainstorming, Functional Analysis, and SCAMPER method. The `degree of creativity' of each design outcome is assessed by means of a questionnaire offered to a number of experts and by means of three different metrics: the metric of Moss, the metric of Sarkar and Chakrabarti, and the evaluation of innovative potential. The three metrics share the property of measuring the creativity as a combination of the degree of novelty and the degree of usefulness. The results show that Brainstorming provides more creative outcomes than when no method is applied, while this is not proved for SCAMPER and Functional Analysis.

Exploiting coherence for the simultaneous discovery of latent facets and associated sentiments

Facet-based sentiment analysis involves discovering the latent facets, sentiments and their associations. Traditional facet-based sentiment analysis algorithms typically perform the various tasks in sequence, and fail to take advantage of the mutual reinforcement of the tasks. Additionally,inferring sentiment levels typically requires domain knowledge or human intervention. In this paper, we propose aseries of probabilistic models that jointly discover latent facets and sentiment topics, and also order the sentiment topics with respect to a multi-point scale, in a language and domain independent manner. This is achieved by simultaneously capturing both short-range syntactic structure and long range semantic dependencies between the sentiment and facet words. The models further incorporate coherence in reviews, where reviewers dwell on one facet or sentiment level before moving on, for more accurate facet and sentiment discovery. For reviews which are supplemented with ratings, our models automatically order the latent sentiment topics, without requiring seed-words or domain-knowledge. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first attempt to combine the notions of syntactic and semantic dependencies in the domain of review mining. Further, the concept of facet and sentiment coherence has not been explored earlier either. Extensive experimental results on real world review data show that the proposed models outperform various state of the art baselines for facet-based sentiment analysis.

A sequential dual method for structural SVMs

In many real world prediction problems the output is a structured object like a sequence or a tree or a graph. Such problems range from natural language processing to compu- tational biology or computer vision and have been tackled using algorithms, referred to as structured output learning algorithms. We consider the problem of structured classifi- cation. In the last few years, large margin classifiers like sup-port vector machines (SVMs) have shown much promise for structured output learning. The related optimization prob -lem is a convex quadratic program (QP) with a large num-ber of constraints, which makes the problem intractable for large data sets. This paper proposes a fast sequential dual method (SDM) for structural SVMs. The method makes re-peated passes over the training set and optimizes the dual variables associated with one example at a time. The use of additional heuristics makes the proposed method more efficient. We present an extensive empirical evaluation of the proposed method on several sequence learning problems.Our experiments on large data sets demonstrate that the proposed method is an order of magnitude faster than state of the art methods like cutting-plane method and stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). Further, SDM reaches steady state generalization performance faster than the SGD method. The proposed SDM is thus a useful alternative for large scale structured output learning.

Infinite push: a new support vector ranking algorithm that directly optimizes accuracy at the absolute top of the list

Ranking problems have become increasingly important in machine learning and data mining in recent years, with applications ranging from information retrieval and recommender systems to computational biology and drug discovery. In this paper, we describe a new ranking algorithm that directly maximizes the number of relevant objects retrieved at the absolute top of the list. The algorithm is a support vector style algorithm, but due to the different objective, it no longer leads to a quadratic programming problem. Instead, the dual optimization problem involves l1, ∞ constraints; we solve this dual problem using the recent l1, ∞ projection method of Quattoni et al (2009). Our algorithm can be viewed as an l∞-norm extreme of the lp-norm based algorithm of Rudin (2009) (albeit in a support vector setting rather than a boosting setting); thus we refer to the algorithm as the ‘Infinite Push’. Experiments on real-world data sets confirm the algorithm’s focus on accuracy at the absolute top of the list.

Differential viability response of prokaryotes and eukaryotes to high strength pulsed magnetic stimuli

The present study examines the efficacy of a high strength pulsed magnetic field (PMF) towards bacterial inactivation in vitro, without compromising eukaryotic cell viability. The differential response of prokaryotes Staphylococcus aureus (MESA), Staphylococcus epidermidis, and Escherichia coli], and eukaryotes C2C12 mouse myoblasts and human mesenchymal stem cells, hMSCs] upon exposure to varying PMF stimuli (1-4 T, 30 pulses, 40 ms pulse duration) is investigated. Among the prokaryotes, similar to 60% and similar to 70% reduction was recorded in the survival of staphylococcal species and E. coli, respectively at 4 T PMF as evaluated by colony forming unit (CPU) analysis and flow cytometry. A 2-5 fold increase in intracellular ROS (reactive oxygen species) levels suggests oxidative stress as the key mediator in PMF induced bacterial death/injury. The 4 T PMF treated staphylococci also exhibited longer doubling times. Both TEM and fluorescence microscopy revealed compromised membranes of PMF exposed bacteria. Under similar PMF exposure conditions, no immediate cytotoxicity was recorded in C2C12 mouse myoblasts and hMSCs, which can be attributed to the robust resistance towards oxidative stress. The ion interference of iron containing bacterial proteins is invoked to analytically explain the PMF induced ROS accumulation in prokaryotes. Overall, this study establishes the potential of PMF as a bactericidal method without affecting eukaryotic viability. This non-invasive stimulation protocol coupled with antimicrobial agents can be integrated as a potential methodology for the localized treatment of prosthetic infections. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Comportamiento agronómico de diecisiete materiales genéticos de tomate (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill) bajo las condiciones ambientales del Valle de Sébaco, Matagalpa

El trabajo investigativo se realizó en la Estación Experimental ̈Raúl González del Valle de Sébaco, Matagalpa del 14 de Noviembre del 2002 al 21 de Marzo del 2003. Evaluándose 15 cultivares de tomate, de los cuales 10 eran de tipo industrial y 5 de mesa proveniente del AVRDC (Centro Asiático de Investigación en Hortalizas y Desarrollo) de Taiwán, y dos israelitas Ty -4 y Ty-13. Los objetivos que se perseguían eran: determinar el número de mosca blanca (Bemisia tabaci Genn) por planta, la tolerancia de los cultivares a la virosis transmitida por éste, evaluar variables de crecimiento y de rendimiento. El diseño experimental utilizado fue unifactorial en bloques completamente al azar (BCA) con cuatro réplicas y 17 tratamientos. Los cultivares israelitas mostraron el mayor número de mosca blanca, y una severidad de virosis de 3 (mosaico y corrugado de hojas generalizado) en la escala de 1 - 5 utilizada por el CEVAS. Los cultivares FMTT-907 y FMTT-934 presentaron las mayores alturas con valores de 86.75 y 86.35cm. Los cultivares Ty-13 y Ty-4 obtuvieron los mayores rendimientos con 14,140 y 10,699 kg/ha, debido a que estos presentaron frutos más grandes y mostraron tolerancia a la virosis transmitida por mosca blanca, lo que se refleja en un mejor rendimiento.

La literatura artúrica en un roman borgoñón del siglo XV : la impronta de Chrétien de Troyas en Cleriadus et Meliadice

Integran este número de la revista ponencias presentadas en Studia Hispanica Medievalia VIII: Actas de las IX Jornadas Internacionales de Literatura Española Medieval, 2008, y de Homenaje al Quinto Centenario de Amadis de Gaula

El amor de Alfonso El Magnánimo y Lucrezia D'Alagno a través de los poemas de Carvajal

Integran este número de la revista ponencias presentadas en Studia Hispanica Medievalia VIII : Actas de las X Jornadas Internacionales de Literatura Española Medieval, 2011, y de Homenaje al Quinto Centenario del Cancionero General de Hernando del Castillo.