BACKGROUND Orange-fleshed sweet potato is an efficacious source of vitamin A. Substituting wheat flour with orange-fleshed sweet potato in processed products could reduce foreign exchange outlays, create new markets for producers, and result in increased vitamin A consumption among consumers provided there is adequate retention of beta-carotene during processing. OBJECTIVE To explore whether ...

‎this paper presents an application of partial differential equations(pdes) for the segmentation of abdominal and thoracic aortic in cta datasets. an important challenge in reliably detecting aortic is the need to overcome problems associated with intensity inhomogeneities. level sets are part of an important class of methods that utilize partial differential equations (pdes) and have been exte...

OBJECTIVES Key diagnostic decisions often turn on measurement of change in pain intensity after diagnostic anesthetic blocks. This study aimed to introduce a new direct measure pain intensity change and compare it with percent change as calculated from the traditional preprocedure and postprocedure pain visual analog scales. METHODS Shoulder pain patients enrolled in a diagnostic accuracy stu...

Research with violent offenders has consistently shown impaired recognition of other's facial expressions of emotion. However, the extent to which similar problems can be observed among sexual offenders remains unknown. Using a computerized task, we presented sexual and violent offenders, and non-offenders, with male and female expressions of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surpri...

In this paper, we provide a novel dynamic decision method of blockchain selfish mining by applying the sensitivity-based optimization theory. Our aim is to find optimal blockchain-pegged policy dishonest pool. To study attacks, two pools designed means different competitive criterions, where honest pool follows two-block leading criterion, while modification criterion through using policy. poli...

Shanghai, one of the most developed cities in China, is implementing a pilot regional carbon emission trading scheme. Estimating the marginal abatement costs of CO2 emissions for the industrial sectors covered in Shanghai's emission trading scheme provides the government and participating firms useful information for devising compliance policies. This paper employs multiple distance function ap...

to measure an unbiased farm-specific efficiency of individual dairy farmers, a shadow-price profit frontier adjusted for market distortion was applied to a sample of 860 iranian small intensive dairy farms surveyed in 2005-2006. this measure was then compared with that of unadjusted measure that assumes undistorted market. a multiple general linear model (glm) technique was applied to the data ...

The stable carbon isotope composition of dissolved inorganic carbon (δ13C-DIC) can be used to quantify fluxes within the carbon system. For example, knowing the δ13C signature of the inorganic carbon pool can help in describing the amount of anthropogenic carbon in the water column. The measurements can also be used for evaluating modeled carbon fluxes, for making basin-wide estimates of anthro...