Selection of Marine Yeasts for the Generation of Single Cell Protein from Prawn-shell Waste

Marine yeasts (33 strains) were isolated from the coastal and offshore waters off Cochin. The isolates were identified and then characterized for the utilization of starch, gelatin, lipid, cellulose, urea, pectin, lignin, chitin and prawn-shell waste. Most of the isolates were Candida species. Based on the biochemical characterization, four potential strains were selected and their optimum pH and NaCI concentration for growth were determined. These strains were then inoculated into prawn-shell waste and SCP (single cell protein) generation was noted in terms of the increase in protein content of the final product.

User Profile Management and Selection in Context-Aware Service Platforms for Networks Beyond 3G

In recent years, progress in the area of mobile telecommunications has changed our way of life, in the private as well as the business domain. Mobile and wireless networks have ever increasing bit rates, mobile network operators provide more and more services, and at the same time costs for the usage of mobile services and bit rates are decreasing. However, mobile services today still lack functions that seamlessly integrate into users’ everyday life. That is, service attributes such as context-awareness and personalisation are often either proprietary, limited or not available at all. In order to overcome this deficiency, telecommunications companies are heavily engaged in the research and development of service platforms for networks beyond 3G for the provisioning of innovative mobile services. These service platforms are to support such service attributes. Service platforms are to provide basic service-independent functions such as billing, identity management, context management, user profile management, etc. Instead of developing own solutions, developers of end-user services such as innovative messaging services or location-based services can utilise the platform-side functions for their own purposes. In doing so, the platform-side support for such functions takes away complexity, development time and development costs from service developers. Context-awareness and personalisation are two of the most important aspects of service platforms in telecommunications environments. The combination of context-awareness and personalisation features can also be described as situation-dependent personalisation of services. The support for this feature requires several processing steps. The focus of this doctoral thesis is on the processing step, in which the user’s current context is matched against situation-dependent user preferences to find the matching user preferences for the current user’s situation. However, to achieve this, a user profile management system and corresponding functionality is required. These parts are also covered by this thesis. Altogether, this thesis provides the following contributions: The first part of the contribution is mainly architecture-oriented. First and foremost, we provide a user profile management system that addresses the specific requirements of service platforms in telecommunications environments. In particular, the user profile management system has to deal with situation-specific user preferences and with user information for various services. In order to structure the user information, we also propose a user profile structure and the corresponding user profile ontology as part of an ontology infrastructure in a service platform. The second part of the contribution is the selection mechanism for finding matching situation-dependent user preferences for the personalisation of services. This functionality is provided as a sub-module of the user profile management system. Contrary to existing solutions, our selection mechanism is based on ontology reasoning. This mechanism is evaluated in terms of runtime performance and in terms of supported functionality compared to other approaches. The results of the evaluation show the benefits and the drawbacks of ontology modelling and ontology reasoning in practical applications.

Farmers’ desired traits and selection criteria for maize varieties and their implications for maize breeding: A case study from KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa

Adoption of hybrids and improved varieties has remained low in the smallholder farming sector of South Africa, despite maize being the staple food crop for the majority of households. The objective of this study was to establish preferred maize characteristics by farmers which can be used as selection criteria by maize breeders in crop improvement. Data were collected from three villages of a selected smallholder farming area in South Africa using a survey covering 300 households and participatory rural appraisal methodology. Results indicated a limited selection of maize varieties grown by farmers in the area compared to other communities in Africa. More than 97% of the farmers grew a local landrace called Natal-8-row or IsiZulu. Hybrids and improved open pollinated varieties were planted by less than 40% of the farmers. The Natal-8-row landrace had characteristics similar to landraces from eastern and southern Africa and closely resembled Hickory King, a landrace still popular in Southern Africa. The local landrace was preferred for its taste, recycled seed, tolerance to abiotic stresses and yield stability. Preferred characteristics of maize varieties were high yield and prolificacy, disease resistance, early maturity, white grain colour, and drying and shelling qualities. Farmers were willing to grow hybrids if the cost of seed and other inputs were affordable and their preferences were considered. Our results show that breeding opportunities exist for improving the farmers’ local varieties and maize breeders can take advantage of these preferred traits and incorporate them into existing high yielding varieties.

Attentional Selection in Object Recognition

A key problem in object recognition is selection, namely, the problem of identifying regions in an image within which to start the recognition process, ideally by isolating regions that are likely to come from a single object. Such a selection mechanism has been found to be crucial in reducing the combinatorial search involved in the matching stage of object recognition. Even though selection is of help in recognition, it has largely remained unsolved because of the difficulty in isolating regions belonging to objects under complex imaging conditions involving occlusions, changing illumination, and object appearances. This thesis presents a novel approach to the selection problem by proposing a computational model of visual attentional selection as a paradigm for selection in recognition. In particular, it proposes two modes of attentional selection, namely, attracted and pay attention modes as being appropriate for data and model-driven selection in recognition. An implementation of this model has led to new ways of extracting color, texture and line group information in images, and their subsequent use in isolating areas of the scene likely to contain the model object. Among the specific results in this thesis are: a method of specifying color by perceptual color categories for fast color region segmentation and color-based localization of objects, and a result showing that the recognition of texture patterns on model objects is possible under changes in orientation and occlusions without detailed segmentation. The thesis also presents an evaluation of the proposed model by integrating with a 3D from 2D object recognition system and recording the improvement in performance. These results indicate that attentional selection can significantly overcome the computational bottleneck in object recognition, both due to a reduction in the number of features, and due to a reduction in the number of matches during recognition using the information derived during selection. Finally, these studies have revealed a surprising use of selection, namely, in the partial solution of the pose of a 3D object.

Model Selection in Summary Evaluation

A difficulty in the design of automated text summarization algorithms is in the objective evaluation. Viewing summarization as a tradeoff between length and information content, we introduce a technique based on a hierarchy of classifiers to rank, through model selection, different summarization methods. This summary evaluation technique allows for broader comparison of summarization methods than the traditional techniques of summary evaluation. We present an empirical study of two simple, albeit widely used, summarization methods that shows the different usages of this automated task-based evaluation system and confirms the results obtained with human-based evaluation methods over smaller corpora.

Feature Selection for Face Detection

We present a new method to select features for a face detection system using Support Vector Machines (SVMs). In the first step we reduce the dimensionality of the input space by projecting the data into a subset of eigenvectors. The dimension of the subset is determined by a classification criterion based on minimizing a bound on the expected error probability of an SVM. In the second step we select features from the SVM feature space by removing those that have low contributions to the decision function of the SVM.

Sales restriction, quality selection and the mode of competition

A regulator imposing “sales restrictions” on firms competing in oligopolistic markets may enhance quality provision by the firms. Moreover, for most restrictions levels, the impact on quality selection is invariant to the mode of competition

La facilitación del cambio en los centros escolares : un estudio de caso sobre el papel del director en los procesos de gestión y mejora escolar.

Se intenta conocer el modo en que se configuran y articulan los procesos de gestión y su relación con la mejora escolar, destacando y estudiando el papel del director en la facilitación de cambio. Comprender cómo se han articulado dinámicas de liderazgo que hayan facilitado el cambio. Es un estudio de caso único con una focalización particular en la figura del director, como consecuencia del estudio seguido en un centro. Esta investigación se enmarca dentro de un enfoque y metodología cualitativa, mediante la estancia continua del investigador en el centro. Autobiografía. Entrevista semiestructurada. Observación. Notas de campo. Destacan los documentos escritos oficiales del centro y documentos internos recogidos en una base de datos. Estancia prolongada del investigador en el campo. Autores. Identificación de códigos y categorías. Combinación del análisis temático y cronológico de la información. Pone de relieve la necesidad de atender a la figura de los directores escolares que situados a medio camino entre la administración educativa y la escuela, desempeñan una función muy importante de cara a facilitar el cambio en los centros, posición inestable e incómoda para el desarrollo de su actividad profesional. El ejercicio de la acción directiva como poder que conlleva un gasto de energía personal y profesional. La escuela como organización y sus prácticas no pueden quedar al margen del contexto o momento histórico-social en el que se instaura. La comprensión del proceso organizativo que tiene que ver con la gestión escolar no llega a comprenderse en su totalidad si no se acude a referentes previos situados más atrás en el tiempo. Se pone de relieve la naturaleza esencialmente política de las dinámicas organizativas y el conflicto como parte esencial de ellas. Importancia del ejercicio del liderazgo educativo como instrumento para facilitar la gestión y mejora de la escuela como organización; igualmente las buenas relaciones con el exterior son importantes, así como la necesidad de construir un ambiente de trabajo y de convivencia como elementos esenciales en el proceso y mejora escolar. Necesidades formativas de los directores y profesores que en un futuro puedan desempeñar este cargo. Atender cuidadosamente las relaciones que se establezcan entre instituciones como escuela y universidad a la hora de crear compromisos de trabajo y colaboración entre ambas. Los directores son unas piezas clave en este momento de reforma del sistema educativo, pues se les ha prestado poca atención a todo lo que es su ejercicio y su actividad profesional. La dirección no debe concebirse como un asunto meramente administrativo o de gestión, sino como un instrumento de cambio fundamentalmente. Buscando modos y formas para establecer un trabajo de colaboración en y con los centros, entre agentes externos e internos, se ha llegado a focalizar el estudio sobre la figura del director escolar.

Joan Majó, director general d'Universitats

Joan Majó va ser nomenat director general d’Universitats l’abril del 2007. Des del seu nomenament ha procurat eixamplar el diàleg per fer avançar les transformacions que el sistema universitari requereix. Majó avança que el 2009 no serà un any d’alegries