Influence of heat on biological activity and concentration of oleocanthal : a natural anti-inflammatory agent in virgin olive oil

The olive oil phenolic oleocanthal is a natural nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory compound that irritates the oral pharynx in a dose-dependent manner. It has been proposed that the biological activity of oleocanthal is partially responsible for the beneficial health effects of the Mediterranean diet. Virgin
olive oil containing oleocanthal is often added as an ingredient in a number of cooked dishes, and therefore it is of great importance to understand how best to preserve the putative health-promoting benefits of this compound, as olive oil phenolics are subject to degradation upon heating in general. One extra virgin olive oil containing 53.9 mg/kg oleocanthal was heated at various temperatures (100, 170, and 240 °C) for set time periods (0, 1, 5, 20, 60, and 90 min). Oleocanthal concentrations were quantified using HPLC, and its biological activity was determined with a taste bioassay measuring the intensity of throat irritation. Results demonstrated that oleocanthal was heat stable compared with other olive oil phenolics, with a maximum loss of 16% as determined by HPLC analysis. However, there was a significant decrease of up to 31% (p < 0.05) in the biological activity of oleocanthal as determined by the taste bioassay. Although there was minimal degradation of leocanthal concentration, there was a significant decrease in the biological activity of oleocanthal upon extended heating time, indicating a possible loss of the putative health -benefiting properties of oleocanthal. Alternatively, the difference in the concentration and biological activity of oleocanthal after heat treatment could be a result of an oleocanthal antagonist forming, decreasing or masking the biological activity of oleocanthal.

Finite-time consensus algorithm of multi-agent networks

This paper is concerned with leader-follower finite-time consensus control of multi-agent networks with input disturbances. Terminal sliding mode control scheme is used to design the distributed control law. A new terminal sliding mode surface is proposed to guarantee finite-time consensus under fixed topology, with the common assumption that the position and the velocity of the active leader is known to its neighbors only. By using the finite-time Lyapunov stability theorem, it is shown that if the directed graph of the network has a directed spanning tree, then the terminal sliding mode control law can guarantee finite-time consensus even under the assumption that the time-varying control input of the active leader is unknown to any follower.

Effects of leveling agent on the uptake of reactive dyes by untreated and plasma-treated wool

Atmospheric-pressure plasma treatment of wool fabric produced a significantly higher level of adsorbed fiber-reactive dye when applied at 50 °C (pH 3.0–6.0) in the absence of any organic leveling agent. In addition, color yields indicated that dye was more uniformly adsorbed by the plasma-treated fabric compared with the untreated material. When untreated fabric was dyed in the presence of a leveling agent (Albegal B), the extent and levelness of dye sorption were enhanced. These enhancements were, however, relatively small on the plasma-treated wool compared with those on untreated wool. A ‘surface’ mechanism, similar to that proposed when plasma-treated wool is dyed in the absence of leveling agent, can explain the leveling ability of Albegal B under adsorption conditions. Increasing the dyebath temperature to 90 °C resulted in dye penetration of the fibers. Under these conditions, any enhancements of dye uptake produced by the plasma treatment, as well as the use of Albegal B, were relatively small, in contrast to the behavior at 50 °C. Improvements in the uniformity of dye sorption observed at 50 °C were, however, maintained at the higher temperature. It is concluded that the inability of reactive dyes to migrate (and so promote leveling and uniformity) once they have reacted with the fiber, means that differences in the uniformity of dye sorbed at 50 °C are still apparent at equilibrium.

Optimising discrete event simulation models using a reinforcement learning agent

A reinforcement learning agent has been developed to determine optimal operating policies in a multi-part serial line. The agent interacts with a discrete event simulation model of a stochastic production facility. This study identifies issues important to the simulation developer who wishes to optimise a complex simulation or develop a robust operating policy. Critical parameters pertinent to 'tuning' an agent quickly and enabling it to rapidly learn the system were investigated.

Agent-based hybrid framework for decision making on complex problems

Electronic commerce and the Internet have created demand for automated systems that can make complex decisions utilizing information from multiple sources. Because the information is uncertain, dynamic, distributed, and heterogeneous in nature, these systems require a great diversity of intelligent techniques including expert systems, fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms. However, in complex decision making, many different components or sub-tasks are involved, each of which requires different types of processing. Thus multiple such techniques are required resulting in systems called hybrid intelligent systems. That is, hybrid solutions are crucial for complex problem solving and decision making. There is a growing demand for these systems in many areas including financial investment planning, engineering design, medical diagnosis, and cognitive simulation. However, the design and development of these systems is difficult because they have a large number of parts or components that have many interactions. From a multi-agent perspective, agents in multi-agent systems (MAS) are autonomous and can engage in flexible, high-level interactions. MASs are good at complex, dynamic interactions. Thus a multi-agent perspective is suitable for modeling, design, and construction of hybrid intelligent systems. The aim of this thesis is to develop an agent-based framework for constructing hybrid intelligent systems which are mainly used for complex problem solving and decision making. Existing software development techniques (typically, object-oriented) are inadequate for modeling agent-based hybrid intelligent systems. There is a fundamental mismatch between the concepts used by object-oriented developers and the agent-oriented view. Although there are some agent-oriented methodologies such as the Gaia methodology, there is still no specifically tailored methodology available for analyzing and designing agent-based hybrid intelligent systems. To this end, a methodology is proposed, which is specifically tailored to the analysis and design of agent-based hybrid intelligent systems. The methodology consists of six models - role model, interaction model, agent model, skill model, knowledge model, and organizational model. This methodology differs from other agent-oriented methodologies in its skill and knowledge models. As good decisions and problem solutions are mainly based on adequate information, rich knowledge, and appropriate skills to use knowledge and information, these two models are of paramount importance in modeling complex problem solving and decision making. Follow the methodology, an agent-based framework for hybrid intelligent system construction used in complex problem solving and decision making was developed. The framework has several crucial characteristics that differentiate this research from others. Four important issues relating to the framework are also investigated. These cover the building of an ontology for financial investment, matchmaking in middle agents, reasoning in problem solving and decision making, and decision aggregation in MASs. The thesis demonstrates how to build a domain-specific ontology and how to access it in a MAS by building a financial ontology. It is argued that the practical performance of service provider agents has a significant impact on the matchmaking outcomes of middle agents. It is proposed to consider service provider agents' track records in matchmaking. A way to provide initial values for the track records of service provider agents is also suggested. The concept of ‘reasoning with multimedia information’ is introduced, and reasoning with still image information using symbolic projection theory is proposed. How to choose suitable aggregation operations is demonstrated through financial investment application and three approaches are proposed - the stationary agent approach, the token-passing approach, and the mobile agent approach to implementing decision aggregation in MASs. Based on the framework, a prototype was built and applied to financial investment planning. This prototype consists of one serving agent, one interface agent, one decision aggregation agent, one planning agent, four decision making agents, and five service provider agents. Experiments were conducted on the prototype. The experimental results show the framework is flexible, robust, and fully workable. All agents derived from the methodology exhibit their behaviors correctly as specified.

VVP808 is a novel agent that improves glucose tolerance in DIO mice

As the prevalence of diabetes mellitus continues to increase, there is an urgent need to discover new, effective treatment strategies to combat this disorder. In this study, we tested a novel agent, VVP808, which we previously demonstrated has insulin-sensitising properties (as measured by an increase in insulin-stimulated glucose uptake in 3T3-L1 adipocytes). A dose-ranging study was performed (10-100mg/kg/d) in C57BL/6J mice that had been fed a high-fat diet (45% of energy) for 12 weeks. VVP808 was administered by single daily oral gavage for a period of 16 days. Body weight, food intake and water intake were measured daily, whilst fasting blood glucose and plasma insulin levels were measured at the beginning and end of the study, with an intra-peritoneal glucose tolerance test (ipGTT) performed on day -1 and day 13. Administration of VVP808 to diet-induced obese (DIO) mice caused a strong dose-dependent improvement in glucose tolerance. There was a 34-42% reduction in the blood glucose area under the curve (AUC) at doses of 20mg/kg, 50mg/kg and 100mg/kg VVP808 (p=0.02-0.005). Administration of VVP808 resulted in a small but significant reduction in body weight in the 50mg/kg and 100mg/kg treated animals relative to vehicle (p=0.01 and 0.001 respectively). This decrease in body weight was associated with a reduction in food intake for the 100mg/kg treated animals only. Epididymal fat pad weight was significantly reduced in animals treated with 100mg/kg VVP808 (p=0.01). Furthermore, treatment with VVP808 for 16 days resulted in a highly significant dose-dependent reduction in fasting blood glucose levels relative to vehicle treated animals (p= 0.01-0.001). In conclusion, our data showed that VVP808 acts in a dose-dependent manner to reduce fasting blood glucose levels and improve glucose tolerance. These data suggest that VVP808 is an interesting new agent with potential for development as a novel therapeutic for type 2 diabetes.

Recent advances of metal binding protein lactoferrin as an anti-microbial agent

Lactoferrin (Lf) is present in milk and gland secretions and serve as an antimicrobial function. Insufficient amounts of Lf in some secretions also appear to correlate with certain health problems. Protection against gastroenteritis is the most likely biologically relevant activity of lactoferrin. Multiple in vitro and animal studies have shown a protective effect of lactoferrin on infections with enteric microorganisms, including rotavirus, Giardia, Shigella, Salmonella and the diarrheagenic Escherichia coli. Lactoferrin has two major effects on enteric pathogens: it inhibits growth and it impairs function of surface expressed virulence factors thereby decreasing their ability to adhere or to invade mammalian cells. Lf also inhibits several species of fungi and certain parasites. This review covers the role of Lf in clearing the parasitic infections. The mechanism by which lactoferrin inhibits some parasites may be via stimulation of the process of phagocytosis, whereby immune cells engulf and digest foreign organisms. Trichomonas vaginalis is a protozoan responsible for the number one, non-viral sexually transmitted disease. In this review, we also discussed the role of Lf in cervical infections.

Silver sulfide as a staining agent for scanning electron microscopy of nylon 6/MXD6 blends

BACKGROUND: In transmission and scanning electron microscopy imaging, the ability to obtain sufficient contrast between the components of a blend when they are both of a similar chemical structure still remains problematic. This paper investigates the domain morphology of a polymer blend containing two polyamides, nylon 6 and the semi-aromatic polyamide poly(m-xylene adipamide) (MXD6), using scanning electron microscopy in backscattered electron imaging mode. The efficiency of three staining agents, ruthenium tetroxide, phosphotungstic acid and silver sulfide, in obtaining optimum phase contrast between the two polymers is discussed.
RESULTS: The use of silver sulfide as a staining agent was found to be a fast and reliable approach which required basic sample preparation and provided excellent compositional contrast between the phases present in the nylon 6/MXD6 blends compared to the other staining agents.
CONCLUSIONS: The technique described in this paper is believed to be a novel and versatile method that has the potential to further improve the ability to study complex polymer blends where one polymer contains an aromatic ring.

Enhancements to fraud and deception prevention in open multi-agent marketplaces

Fraud and deception in online marketplaces has been an on-going problem. This thesis proposes novel techniques and mechanisms using agent technology to protect buyers and sellers in online environments such as eBay. The proposed solution has been rigorously tested and the results show good commercial promise.

Agent-based heuristics to solve NP-hard scheduling problems

A novel agent-driven heuristic approach was developed to control the operational scheduling for a local manufacturer. This approach outperformed the traditional kanban control mechanism under numerous simulated benchmarking tests. Using this approach, the individual machine loading was reduced by, on average, 28%, with the loading spread reduced by 85%

Co-ordination in multi-agent systems

A multi-agent system is a complex software system which is composed of many relative autonomous smaller softwares called agents. The research on multi-agent systems is concerned with the interaction and coordination among these agents to let them help each other to solve complicated problems, such as finance investment management. The principal contributions represented by these 50 selected papers are "cooperation under uncertainty in distributed expert systems (DESs)", "a tool and algorithms to build DESs", and "information gathering and decision making in multi-agent systems (MASs)".

An agent architecture for managing data resources in a grid environment

The agent paradigm has been successfully used in a large number of research areas. MAPFS, a parallel file system, constitutes one successful application of agents to the I/O field, providing a multiagent I/O architecture. The use of a multiagent system implies coordination and cooperation among its agents. MAPFS is oriented to clusters of workstations, where agents are applied in order to provide features such as caching or prefetching. The adaptation of MAPFS to a grid environment is named MAPFS-Grid. Agents can help to increase the performance of data-intensive applications running on top of the grid.

This paper describes the conceptual agent framework and the communication model used in MAPFS-Grid, which provides the management of data resources in a grid environment. The evaluation of our proposal shows the advantages of using agents in a data grid.

An agent-based hybrid system for microarray data analysis

This article reports our experience in agent-based hybrid construction for microarray data analysis. The contributions are twofold: We demonstrate that agent-based approaches are suitable for building hybrid systems in general, and that a genetic ensemble system is appropriate for microarray data analysis in particular. Created using an agent-based framework, this genetic ensemble system for microarray data analysis excels in both sample classification accuracy and gene selection reproducibility.

Climate change in the Victorian Alps : can VET be a change agent?

Of all the factors contributing to turbulent times in Australia, climate change is one that offers both challenges and opportunities for VET. In a time when the response to water availability is subject to ‘extensive debate and policy attention’, our presentation explores what adults living and working in the Alpine region of Victoria understand about the changes to water availability, and what they have learned about adapting to significant climatic changes in their local area. Interviews were conducted in the towns of Bright, Mount Beauty and Albury, with participants from across the Alpine region. Our study found evidence of a strong understanding of the direct impact of climate change on participants’ local community area, and a keen desire to learn about adaptation to change. In addition to an identified need for more information around climate change issues and projected impacts in general, participants saw practical hands-on water education strategies as an important way to educate people to help themselves. Conversations about where or how people learned to adapt to change were broad ranging, and clearly connected to the participants’ backgrounds, livelihoods or where they were situated. This raised the question of what responses VET might develop to address these identified learning needs. Major local industries
of tourism, agriculture, water harvesting and land care are all covered by national Training Packages that include industry- specific units of competence to support learning to live and work in an environmentally sustainable way. In addition, the national Employability Skills framework offers opportunities to build climate change awareness and adaptation into units of competency where they may not be explicitly incorporated. Our presentation will outline the opportunities for VET to act as a change agent in this and other Australian communities impacted by climate change.