We report here the characterization of slamdance (sda), a Drosophila melanogaster "bang-sensitive" (BS) paralytic mutant. This mutant exhibits hyperactive behavior and paralysis following a mechanical "bang" or electrical shock. Electrophysiological analyses have shown that this mutant is much more prone to seizure episodes than normal flies because it has a drastically lowered seizure threshol...

The objective of this study was to determine the effect of antimicrobials on the survival and proliferation of Listeria monocytogenes in turkey breast rolls following electron-beam irradiation. Six antimicrobial additive treatments that include no preservatives (control), 0.1% potassium benzoate (PB), 2% sodium lactate (SL), 0.1% potassium benzoate plus 2% sodium lactate (PB + SL), 2% sodium la...

We present the framework of generalised supply-demand analysis (SDA) of a kinetic model of a cellular system, which can be applied to networks of arbitrary complexity. By fixing the concentrations of each of the variable species in turn and varying them in a parameter scan, rate characteristics of supply-demand are constructed around each of these species. By inspecting the shapes of the rate c...

Various plant seeds have received little attention in fatty acid research. Seeds from 30 species mainly of Boraginaceae and Primulaceae were analysed in order to identify potential new sources of the n-3 PUFA α-linolenic acid (ALA) and stearidonic acid (SDA) and of the n-6 PUFA γ-linolenic acid (GLA). The fatty acid distribution differed enormously between genera of the same family. Echium spec...

Nuisance Attribute Projection (NAP) provides an effective method of removing the unwanted session variability in a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based speaker recognition system by removing the principal components of this variability. There is no guarantee with the methods proposed, however, that desired speaker variability is retained. This paper investigates the possibility of training NAP di...

A new doubling algorithm – Alternating-Directional Doubling Algorithm (ADDA) – is developed for computing the unique minimal nonnegative solution of an M -Matrix Algebraic Riccati Equation (MARE). It is argued by both theoretical analysis and numerical experiments that ADDA is always faster than two existing doubling algorithms – SDA of Guo, Lin, and Xu (Numer. Math., 103 (2006), pp. 393–412) a...

High-dimensional data requires scalable algorithms. We propose and analyze three scalable and related algorithms for semi-supervised discriminant analysis (SDA). These methods are based on Krylov subspace methods which exploit the data sparsity and the shift-invariance of Krylov subspaces. In addition, the problem definition was improved by adding centralization to the semi-supervised setting. ...

Background: Severe hypothermia (SH, 30 C) increases the risk of pacing-induced ventricular fibrillation (PIVF) by enhancing spatially discordant alternans (SDA). Whether moderate hypothermia (MH, 33 C), which is clinically used for therapeutic hypothermia, also facilitates SDA remains unclear. We hypothesized that MH attenuates SDA occurrence compared with that achieved by SH, and decreases the...

Spatially discordant alternans (SDA) of action potential duration (APD) is a phenomenon where different regions of cardiac tissue exhibit an alternating sequence of APD that are out-of-phase. SDA is arrhythmogenic since it can induce spatial heterogeneity of refractoriness, which can cause wavebreak and reentry. However, the underlying mechanisms for the formation of SDA are not completely unde...

OBJECTIVE To describe a novel neurophysiology based performance analysis of automated seizure detection algorithms for neonatal EEG to characterize features of detected and non-detected seizures and causes of false detections to identify areas for algorithmic improvement. METHODS EEGs of 20 term neonates were recorded (10 seizure, 10 non-seizure). Seizures were annotated by an expert and char...