BACKGROUND Large soft drink sizes increase consumption, and thereby contribute to obesity. Portion size labelling may help consumers to select more appropriate food portions. This study aimed to assess the effectiveness of portion size and caloric Guidelines for Daily Amounts (GDA) labelling on consumers' portion size choices and consumption of regular soft drinks. METHODS A field experiment ...

In this study, a novel fault diagnosis system for rotating machinery using thermal imaging is proposed. This system consists of bi-dimensional empirical mode decomposition (BEMD) for image enhancement, a generalized discriminant analysis (GDA) for feature reduction, and a relevance vector machine (RVM) for fault classification. Firstly, the thermal image obtained from machine conditions is deco...

Being a kind of intelligent method, Neural Network Predictive Control (NNPC) has been used widely to control nonlinear systems. However if traditional gradient decent algorithm (GDA) is employed to generate control signals, the computational cost is relatively too large, so that NNPC seems not to be acceptable for systems with rapid dynamics. To make NNPC be more efficient to general control si...

To operate autonomously in complex environments, an agent must monitor its environment and determine how to respond to new situations. To be considered intelligent, an agent should select actions in pursuit of its goals, and adapt accordingly when its goals need revision. However, most agents assume that their goals are given to them; they cannot recognize when their goals should change. Thus, ...

The optimisation of the nurse rostering problem is chosen in this work due to its importance as an optimisation challenge with an availability to improve the organisation in hospitals duties, also due to its relevance to elevate the health care through an enhancement of the quality in a decision making process. Nurse rostering in the real world is naturally difficult and complex problem. It con...

Staphylococcus lugdunensis is a coagulase negative bacterial pathogen that is particularly associated with severe cases of infectious endocarditis. Unique amongst the coagulase-negative staphylococci, S. lugdunensis harbors an iron regulated surface determinant locus (isd). This locus facilitates the acquisition of heme as a source of nutrient iron during infection and allows iron limitation ca...

Abstract. Precipitation data with high resolution and accuracy are significantly important in numerous hydrological applications. To enhance the spatial of satellite-based precipitation products, an easy-to-use downscaling-calibration method based on a random forest (SRF-DC) is proposed this study, where autocorrelation measurements between neighboring locations considered. SRF-DC consists two ...

MPEG-7 (Moving Picture Experts Group Phase 7) is an XML-based international standard on semantic description of multimedia content. This document discusses the Linguistic DS and related tools. The linguistic DS is a tool, based on the GDA tag set (http://i-content.org/GDA/tagset.html), for semantic annotation of linguistic data in or associated with multimedia content. The current document text...