Subclinical chronic inflammation (SCI) is associated with impaired animal growth. Previous work has demonstrated that olive-derived plant bioactives exhibit anti-inflammatory properties that could possibly counteract the growth-depressing effects of SCI. To test this hypothesis and define the underlying mechanism, we conducted a 30-day study in which piglets fed an olive-oil bioactive extract (...

South Africa has embarked on a process of education renewal by adopting outcomesbased education (OBE). This paper focuses on the linkages between total quality management (TQM) and the outcomes-based approach in an education context. Quality assurance in academic programmes in higher education in South Africa is, in some instances, based on the TQM model because of a strong focus on the employe...

Set-membership algorithms, including the conventional optimal bounding ellipsoid (OBE) algorithm, require a priori knowledge of exact error bounds which is unknown in most applications. Conservative (over-estimated) error bounds used in practice lead to inconsistent parameter estimation. The novel OBE algorithm with automatic bound estimation (OBE-ABE) is shown to be consistently convergent wit...

Compared to normal learning algorithms, for example backpropagation, the optimal bounded ellipsoid (OBE) algorithm has some better properties, such as faster convergence, since it has a similar structure as Kalman filter. OBE has some advantages over Kalman filter training, the noise is not required to be Guassian. In this paper OBE algorithm is applied traing the weights of recurrent neural ne...

|A novel algorithm is studied for the iden-tiication of linear-in-parameters models. This technique is dubbed \Quasi-OBE" (QOBE) because it is based on the principles of optimal bounding ellip-soid (OBE) identiication, but has other geometric and classic least-squares interpretations that enhance its interpretability and application potential. Convergence behavior of both the central point esti...

INTRODUCTION Hallucinations that involve shifts in the subjectively experienced location of the self, have been termed "out-of-body experiences" (OBEs). Early psychiatric accounts cast OBEs as a specific instance of depersonalisation and derealisation disorder (DPD-DR). However, during feelings of alienation and lack of body realism in DPD-DR the self is experienced within the physical body. De...

BACKGROUND There is growing evidence that attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and loss of control (LOC) eating, both prevalent in children and adolescents, may be related to one another. However, the relationship between ADHD and overeating without LOC has been largely unexamined, thus precluding an understanding of the independent contributions of LOC and episode size in these asso...

The author reviews aspects of the out-of-body experience (OBE) related to psychic experiences and personality traits, and describes a continuum of experiences of altered mind/body perception, from the prototypical OBE on the healthy end to schizophrenia and organic brain syndromes on the other end. The impact of the OBE on the individual's life is described, with suggestions for a psychoeducati...

Outlier detection in large datasets is an important problem. There are several recent approaches that employ very reasonable definitions of an outlier. However, a fundamental issue is that the notion of which objects are outliers typically varies between users or, even, datasets. In this paper, we present a novel solution to this problem, by bringing users into the loop. Our OBE (Outlier By Exa...

This paper analyzes the performance of an optimal bounding ellipsoid (OBE) algorithm for tracking time-varying parameters with incrementally bounded time variations. A linear state-space model is used, with the time-varying parameters represented by the state vector. The OBE algorithm exhibits a selective update property for the time and observation-update equations, and necessary and suf-cient...