A need exists to assist South Africans to make better informed food choices. The food label has the potential to assist consumers during food purchasing; however, consumers should be able to understand and use the information provided on food labels. Objective: To investigate adult consumers' understanding regarding the information on food labels and to determine whether they use the information on food labels in making food choices. Design: A cross-sectional and descriptive research approach was followed and data were collected by means of questionnaires. Combined stratified and judgemental sampling methods recruited 174 respondents involved in the purchasing of household food products. Setting: Selected supermarkets in Potchefstroom and Klerksdorp in the North West Province, South Africa, were targeted. Subjects: Consumers of African descent and Caucasian consumers, 18 years or older, who are involved in the purchasing of household food products. Results: Information mostly used on food labels includes the expiry date, ingredient list and nutritional information, such as fat and cholesterol content. Consistently, greater use of "low in fat" and "low in cholesterol" nutrient content claims were cited. Difficulties associated with food labels were mainly indicated as the font size of the print, whereas reasons for not reading food labels were related to product attributes, demographic characteristics and situational factors. Conclusions: Findings indicate that the food choices of the majority of respondents who read food labels are influenced by the information on the food label, although respondents' understanding of the information revealed an inability to apply food label information to make food choices. Reasons for not reading food labels included opinions like the "taste and price are more important than the nutritional content of the food product", "experiencing time constraints", and "lack of education and nutritional knowledge". This study highlighted barriers in consumers' understanding and use of information on food labels. Improvements to the current food labels in South Africa are suggested, as well as guidelines for consumer education regarding the use of food labels. / Thesis (M. Consumer Science)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

A need exists to assist South Africans to make better informed food choices. The food label has the potential to assist consumers during food purchasing; however, consumers should be able to understand and use the information provided on food labels. Objective: To investigate adult consumers' understanding regarding the information on food labels and to determine whether they use the information on food labels in making food choices. Design: A cross-sectional and descriptive research approach was followed and data were collected by means of questionnaires. Combined stratified and judgemental sampling methods recruited 174 respondents involved in the purchasing of household food products. Setting: Selected supermarkets in Potchefstroom and Klerksdorp in the North West Province, South Africa, were targeted. Subjects: Consumers of African descent and Caucasian consumers, 18 years or older, who are involved in the purchasing of household food products. Results: Information mostly used on food labels includes the expiry date, ingredient list and nutritional information, such as fat and cholesterol content. Consistently, greater use of "low in fat" and "low in cholesterol" nutrient content claims were cited. Difficulties associated with food labels were mainly indicated as the font size of the print, whereas reasons for not reading food labels were related to product attributes, demographic characteristics and situational factors. Conclusions: Findings indicate that the food choices of the majority of respondents who read food labels are influenced by the information on the food label, although respondents' understanding of the information revealed an inability to apply food label information to make food choices. Reasons for not reading food labels included opinions like the "taste and price are more important than the nutritional content of the food product", "experiencing time constraints", and "lack of education and nutritional knowledge". This study highlighted barriers in consumers' understanding and use of information on food labels. Improvements to the current food labels in South Africa are suggested, as well as guidelines for consumer education regarding the use of food labels. / Thesis (M. Consumer Science)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

DNA-metal ion interactions are critical for stabilizing conformations of double stranded (ds) DNA and through specific binding sites will influence the interaction of DNA with other molecules. It has been shown that different metal ions bind to different sites within nucleic acids. Work in this thesis exploits the interactions of Zn2+ with nucleic acids that are linked to surfaces. Zn2+ can interact with the phosphodiester backbone and engage in interactions with the purine nucleobases. Electrochemical studies of ds-DNA films have demonstrated that in the presence of Zn2+ films containing a single nucleotide mismatch give rise to a specific electrochemical signature. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) allows the discrimination of mismatched DNA films from those that are fully matched by monitoring differences in the resistance of charge transfer. Scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM) allows multiplexing of the data acquisition and monitoring of the current response I, which is attenuated as a function of mismatch. In this thesis, various potential factors were explored in detail that may impact the discrimination of nucleotide mismatches in ds-DNA films by EIS and SECM. These factors include the position of the mismatch, its type, the number of mismatches, the length of the DNA duplex, and the length of target sequences. In particular, when the two strands are of unequal length, the resulting nucleotide overhang may mask the mismatch signature. Such overhangs are expected in real biosensor applications, in which the DNA is isolated from cellular targets. Results presented here clearly demonstrate that mismatches are readily distinguished from fully matched strands even in overhang systems, suggesting that this approach has promise for realistic sensor applications.

Zugl.: Göttingen, Univ., Diss., 2007

We start by showing that in an active learning setting, the Perceptron algorithm needs $\Omega(\frac{1}{\epsilon^2})$ labels to learn linear separators within generalization error $\epsilon$. We then present a simple selective sampling algorithm for this problem, which combines a modification of the perceptron update with an adaptive filtering rule for deciding which points to query. For data distributed uniformly over the unit sphere, we show that our algorithm reaches generalization error $\epsilon$ after asking for just $\tilde{O}(d \log \frac{1}{\epsilon})$ labels. This exponential improvement over the usual sample complexity of supervised learning has previously been demonstrated only for the computationally more complex query-by-committee algorithm.

Multilabel classification has attracted much interest in recent times due to the wide applicability of the problem and the challenges involved in learning a classifier for multilabeled data. A crucial aspect of multilabel classification is to discover the structure and order of correlations among labels and their effect on the quality of the classifier. In this work, we propose a structural Support Vector Machine (structural SVM) based framework which enables us to systematically investigate the importance of label correlations in multi-label classification. The proposed framework is very flexible and provides a unified approach to handle multiple correlation orders and structures in an adaptive manner and helps to effectively assess the importance of label correlations in improving the generalization performance. We perform extensive empirical evaluation on several datasets from different domains and present results on various performance metrics. Our experiments provide for the first time, interesting insights into the following questions: a) Are label correlations always beneficial in multilabel classification? b) What effect do label correlations have on multiple performance metrics typically used in multilabel classification? c) Is label correlation order significant and if so, what would be the favorable correlation order for a given dataset and a given performance metric? and d) Can we make useful suggestions on the label correlation structure?

Large corporations increasingly utilize business process models for documenting and redesigning their operations. The extent of such modeling initiatives with several hundred models and dozens of often hardly trained modelers calls for automated quality assurance. While formal properties of control flow can easily be checked by existing tools, there is a notable gap for checking the quality of the textual content of models, in particular, its activity labels. In this paper, we address the problem of activity label quality in business process models. We designed a technique for the recognition of labeling styles, and the automatic refactoring of labels with quality issues. More specifically, we developed a parsing algorithm that is able to deal with the shortness of activity labels, which integrates natural language tools like WordNet and the Stanford Parser. Using three business process model collections from practice with differing labeling style distributions, we demonstrate the applicability of our technique. In comparison to a straightforward application of standard natural language tools, our technique provides much more stable results. As an outcome, the technique shifts the boundary of process model quality issues that can be checked automatically from syntactic to semantic aspects.

abstract: Understanding the complexity of temporal and spatial characteristics of gene expression over brain development is one of the crucial research topics in neuroscience. An accurate description of the locations and expression status of relative genes requires extensive experiment resources. The Allen Developing Mouse Brain Atlas provides a large number of in situ hybridization (ISH) images of gene expression over seven different mouse brain developmental stages. Studying mouse brain models helps us understand the gene expressions in human brains. This atlas collects about thousands of genes and now they are manually annotated by biologists. Due to the high labor cost of manual annotation, investigating an efficient approach to perform automated gene expression annotation on mouse brain images becomes necessary. In this thesis, a novel efficient approach based on machine learning framework is proposed. Features are extracted from raw brain images, and both binary classification and multi-class classification models are built with some supervised learning methods. To generate features, one of the most adopted methods in current research effort is to apply the bag-of-words (BoW) algorithm. However, both the efficiency and the accuracy of BoW are not outstanding when dealing with large-scale data. Thus, an augmented sparse coding method, which is called Stochastic Coordinate Coding, is adopted to generate high-level features in this thesis. In addition, a new multi-label classification model is proposed in this thesis. Label hierarchy is built based on the given brain ontology structure. Experiments have been conducted on the atlas and the results show that this approach is efficient and classifies the images with a relatively higher accuracy. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2016

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T15:59:17Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo4992_1.pdf: 465621 bytes, checksum: beb55c17d095bd73e42ae404d38057fa (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2002 / A crescente demanda e o explosivo crescimento da Internet está impondo novos desafios para a garantia de serviços em termos de performance, confiabilidade e Qualidade de Serviço (QoS). Muitas aplicações de missão crítica que dependem das tecnologias de rede não podem funcionar sem garantias expressas de entrega. Entretanto, as redes de dados atuais não oferecem nenhuma garantia de que as exigências feitas a nível de serviço possam ser garantidas sem algum tipo de degradação a qualquer hora, do dia ou da noite, a despeito de outros usuários da rede. Para atender essas exigências, a infra-estrutura da rede precisa ser melhorada com novas tecnologias que ofereçam aos operadores de rede ferramentas para controlar o comportamento da mesma. Juntas, as capacidades oferecidas pela Engenharia de Tráfego, pelo MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) e pelo DiffServ possibilitam o controle e o balanceamento de carga na rede necessários à entrega de serviço de acordo com contratos personalizados. Este trabalho apresenta o MPLS associado à Engenharia de Tráfego como solução para o problema de alocação ineficiente dos recursos em uma rede e o conseqüente congestionamento provocado por tal problema. O esquema de encaminhamento de pacotes do MPLS é empregado como estratégia para minimizar o congestionamento ou alternativamente maximizar a utilização dos recursos, através da alocação eficiente dos mesmos, garantindo, num ambiente com diferenciação de serviço, uma melhor Qualidade de Serviço em termos de redução na perda de pacotes, no atraso e na variação de atraso, e no aumento da vazão agregada

Masters of Science / Problem and significance: Off-label use of medicines is not illegal; however, it can be risky and harmful, or beneficial and innovative. The main problem of this practice is the lack of systems for monitoring adverse drug reactions, since the drugs are used in a manner that is not approved by regulatory agencies. For this reason public health protection is not guaranteed. Purpose: To identify the various systems employed in different regions to monitor/manage the risks and benefits of off-label use; and to ascertain their extent of implementation. Method/search strategy: Electronic and manual literature search was done. Articles referring to off-label medicine use were reviewed. The literature included journal articles, national MRA guidelines, international guidelines, etc. The articles were sourced from databases such as Pubmed and Google Scholar. Data was collected from both developed and emerging markets. There was no limit to publication date. Findings: Pharmacovigilance systems for off-label use do exist although the degree of commitment and advancement differs per country. Explicit off-label laws are present in the developed countries but not in the developing ones. Implications of findings: Stakeholder involvement is very important in monitoring off-label use. Reporting of ADRs can be improved by asserting the role of off-label PV in drug repositioning. The regulator is under pressure to maintain public trust through efficient control of off-label use.