A vision system was used to evaluate external physical damage, mold contamination, and flouryto-vitreous endosperm ratio in corn and mold contamination in soybeans. For each of these quality factors, optimal conditions for acquiring video images and processing algorithms were developed. White light in front-lighting mode with a black background for the sample was suitable for all defects except...

Presidential Decision Directive 63 identified water systems as one of the critical infrastructures to the United States. Following this directive and the passing of The Public Health, Security, and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act there has been increased research effort in both assessing the vulnerability of drinking water systems and proposing protection measures. Drinking water net...

Fresh and packaged food safety, especially of meat products has become a major issue because of microbial contamination. In the present study, an attempt has been made to isolate bacteria from fresh and packaged meat products from various sources and locations. The isolated bacterial samples were identified by Phenotypic, biochemical and molecular characterization. The veracity of the contamina...

background; foods have been many changes from production to tables and continuous control is necessary to maintain food safety and supply foods with good quality. the aim of this study was to evaluate the quality of some foods with high consumption in zanjan city during the 5 years from 2009 to 2013. methods; in a case-control descriptive study with an annually control program during 5 years fr...

We study the question of auction design in an IPV setting characterized by ambiguity. We assume that the preferences of agents exhibit ambiguity aversion; in particular, they are represented by the epsilon-contamination model. We show that a simple variation of a discrete Dutch auction can extract almost all surplus. This contrasts with optimal auctions under IPV without ambiguity as well as wi...

An overview of spin contamination and its relationship to broken-symmetry wave functions are presented. Spinoperator expectation-value formulas are developed for use with generalized, unrestricted, and restricted spin orbitals. Currentprojection techniques are reviewed and illustrated for a variety of current theoretical methods.

The development of Aspergillus flavus inoculation techniques has played an important part in developing corn (Zea mays L.) germplasm resistant to aflatoxin contamination. Corn genotypes evaluated for aflatoxin resistance in field studies must be artificially inoculated due to the sporadic nature of aflatoxin contamination from year to year. A number of different inoculation techniques are used ...

During the previous survey year (Year 2), a methodological issue arose which meant that our measures were no longer providing a reliable indication of how levels of contamination in chickens at retail were changing over time, or providing like for like comparisons between retailers. This methodological issue is explained in the January-March 16 report: www.food.gov.uk/sites/default/files/campy-...

Since the early days of geochemical isotope ratio mass spectrometry there has always been the problem of cross contamination, i.e. the contamination of the sample gas with traces of reference gas (and vice versa) in a dual inlet system and the analyzer itself. This was attributable to valve leakages and could be corrected for. In modern leak-free machines this problem still influences the measu...

Trimming procedures are an important part of the sequence analysis pipeline in an EST Sequencing Project. In general, trimming is done in several phases, each one detecting and removing some kind of undesirable artifact, such as low quality sequence, vectors or adapters sequence, and contamination. However, this strategy often results in a phase being unable to recognize its target because part...