25 research outputs found
Occurrence of acrylamide, hydroxymethylfurfural and furaldehyde as process contaminants in traditional breakfast cereals: “Bsissa”
No full textHydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), furaldehyde (FAL) and acrylamide (AA) are produced during the food roasting
process. The content of these toxic products in a common ready-to-eat breakfast, known as “Bsissa”, was
investigated. This North African traditional food is mainly based on roasted cereals, leguminous and spices. In
the present study, thirty-four commercial “Bsissa” have been investigated for their toxic HMF, FAL and AA
content using RP-HPLC-DAD. Additionally, to distinguish the main way of the production of these toxic products
(Maillard reaction or caramelization origin), total protein, carbohydrates and reducing sugar were quantified and
found in the range 5.63–25.72 g, 45.75–84.33 g and 0.37–3.74 g per 100 g of Bsissa, respectively. This result
makes it also suitable to cover daily needs as a breakfast food. Obtained results showed that HMF and FAL were
detected in most samples, with values not exceeding 24.71 mg/100 g and to 3.91 mg/100 g, respectively. AA was
not detected in all the studied samples. Principal components (PC) and hierarchical classification were employed
to establish the samples’ heat damage based on relations between variables. Two PCs were obtained which
explain more than 75% of the total variance, thus grouping the Bsissa in two clusters based on the main used
cereal. This analysis may help in the mitigation step of furanic compounds by choosing the appropriate Bsissa
ingredients
Geopolitiche mediterranee tra monoteismi e reinterpretazioni storiografiche: il pensiero di Mohamed Talbi
No full textIl presente lavoro di ricerca, nel prendere in esame il pensiero politico di Mohamed Talbi, fautore di un modello di Islam contemporaneo che, nell’universo degli innumerevoli Islam, si contraddistingue per la propensione al dialogo e all’apertura con le culture altre, intende intrecciare il contributo dell’autore con la storia del Maghreb, humus nel quale questo pensiero nasce e affonda le proprie radici. Un’argomentazione così sviluppata riconoscendo la rilevanza del ruolo del passato nella definizione del presente dell’Islam nel tentativo di fornire una cornice storica alla prospettiva religiosa, culturale e politologica proposta da Talbi.
La poco sviluppata tradizione storiografica araba del Maghreb contemporaneo e, al tempo stesso, la necessità di individuare un'interpretazione non contaminata dalla lente occidentale che permetta di coniugare la riflessione sull’Islam religione all’interno della cornice della società islamica, in particolare maghrebina, hanno condotto alla disamina del periodo storico inaugurato dal colonialismo europeo.
Nella prima parte della ricerca, dal punto di vista metodologico, si è ritenuto opportuno concentrare l’attenzione su autori appartenenti al mondo maghrebino, includendo i più significativi contributi di una letteratura che si pone al confine tra la matrice non occidentale e le influenze del mondo occidentale.
Nell’analisi delle interpretazioni storiche del periodo preso in considerazione, dagli anni del colonialismo agli albori delle indipendenze negli Stati dell’area maghrebina, in Marocco, Algeria e Tunisia, sono stati individuati studi e fonti che hanno contribuito in maniera rilevante all’opera di decostruzione della storia di stampo coloniale. Attenzione particolare è stata riservata alla produzione scientifica di Abdallah Laroui e all’opera pubblicata nel 1970 dal titolo "L’histoire du Maghreb: un essai de synthèse", nel quale viene avviata una decostruzione della storiografia coloniale. L’excursus storico contribuisce a fornire strumenti per comprendere le radici della grave crisi identitaria del Maghreb e dell’Islam e del rapporto nei confronti di un Occidente percepito quale entità fautrice di istanze riformiste spesso interpretate come imposizioni esterne.
Nella seconda parte l'analisi storica si intreccia con il pensiero di Mohamed Talbi e con il contributo fornito per lo sviluppo di un nuovo pensiero islamico contemporaneo che coniuga la sacralità del Corano con le esigenze del mondo attuale attraverso l’abbandono di un’interpretazione letterale dei testi e l’adozione di una discrezionalità che tenga conto delle specifiche circostanze temporali nel rispetto della parola divina. Un’ottica di universalità del messaggio del Corano attraverso un’esegesi che lo stesso autore definisce “finalista”. Dalla reinterpretazione delle fonti islamiche al dialogo islamo-cristiano tra le due sponde del Mediterraneo, passando per l’estirpazione degli estremismi violenti e per il diritto alla libertà di coscienza, Talbi elabora un paradigma che si pone l'obiettivo di liberarci da tutti quei sedimenti nascosti che ci impediscono di fondare le nostre società sul dialogo e sul mutuo rispetto al di là di ogni peculiarità religiosa e culturale.This research work, in examining the political thought of Mohamed Talbi, proponent of a model of contemporary Islam that, in the universe of countless Islam, is characterized by its propensity for dialogue and openness with other cultures, aims to combine the author's contribution with the history of the Maghrib, the humus in which this thought is born and has its roots. An argument developed recognizing the importance of the role of the past in defining the present of Islam in an attempt to provide a historical framework to the religious, cultural and political perspective proposed by Talbi.
The underdeveloped Arab historiographical tradition of the contemporary Maghreb and, at the same time, the need to identify an interpretation not contaminated by the Western lens that allows to combine the reflection on Islam religion within the framework of Islamic society, have led to the examination of the historical period opened by European colonialism.
In the first part of the research, from a methodological point of view, it was considered appropriate to focus attention on authors belonging to the Maghrib area, including the most significant contributions of a literature that stands on the border between the non-Western matrix and the influences of the Western world.
In the analysis of the historical interpretations of the period taken in consideration, from the years of colonialism to the dawn of independence in the states of the Maghrib area, in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, it have been identified studies and sources that contributed to the work of deconstruction. Particular attention was dedicated to the scientific production of Abdallah Laroui and to the work published in 1970 entitled "L’histoire du Maghreb: un essai de synthèse", in which a deconstruction of colonial historiography is initiated. The historical excursus contributes to providing tools for understanding the roots of the serious identity crisis in the Maghrib and Islam and the relationship between a West perceived as an entity that promotes reformist demands often interpreted as external impositions.
In the second part, the historical analysis is intertwined with the thought of Mohamed Talbi and with the contribution for the development of a new contemporary Islamic thought that combines the sacredness of the Quran with the needs of the current world through the abandonment of a literal interpretation and the adoption of a discretion that takes into consideration the specific temporal circumstances in respect of the divine word. A view of universality of the message of the Quran through an exegesis that the author defines as "finalist". From the reinterpretation of Islamic sources to the Islamic-Christian dialogue between the two shores of the Mediterranean, passing through the eradication of violent extremisms and the right to freedom of conscience, Talbi elaborates a paradigm that aims to free us from all those hidden sediments that prevent from founding our societies on dialogue and mutual respect beyond any religious and cultural peculiarity
A Critical Review on the Book Ibn Khaldon and History
No full textPersian translation of Ibn Khaldon and History'-a book by Mohammad Talbi (1921-2017); a Tunesian historian and thinker-provide a fortune to Iranian for getting familiar with the author and his thoughts. Although Talbi wrote various works in the field of Muslim thought and history during his life, but a few of his works are translated into the Persian language. Talbi has several articles on Ibn Khaldon life and his Moghaddameh but Ibn Khaldon and History is a single book of Talbi that has been translated and published in the Persian language. After reviewing Ibn Khaldun thought, Talbi asks about the purpose of history. This question inevitably leads to other issues, and finally, Talby comes to the answer: History is inevitably constantly moving towards civilization. Talbi named this prosses: Sonnat Allah. The survey aims to provide a critical assessment of the book and its translation. The most important issue that has been criticized is Talbi Eurocentric historiography
Adaptive Iterated Local Search with Random Restarts for the Balanced Travelling Salesman Problem
No full textMetaheuristics have been widely used to solve NP-hard problems, with excellent results. Among all NP-hard problems, the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) is potentially the most studied one. In this work, a variation of the TSP is considered; the main differences being, edges may have positive or negative costs and the objective is to return a Hamiltonian cycle with cost as close as possible to zero. This variation is called the balanced TSP (BTSP). To tackle this new problem, we present an adaptive variant of the iterated local search metaheuristic featuring also random restart. This algorithm was tested on the MESS2018 metaheuristic competition and achieved notable results, scoring the 5th position overall. In this paper, we detail all the components of the algorithm itself and present the best solutions identified. Even though this metaheuristic was tailored for the BTSP, with small modifications its structure can be applied to virtually any NP-hard problem. In particular, we introduce the uneven reward-and-punishment rule which is a powerful tool, applicable in many contexts where fast responses to dynamic changes are crucial.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Discrete Mathematics and Optimizatio
Contribution to the study of the zonal variation of the climate aridity in central northern Sahara (Algeria)
No full textSolving a Multi-objective Job Shop Scheduling Problem with an Automatically Configured Evolutionary Algorithm
No full textPublisher Copyright: © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.In this work we focus on optimizing a multi-objective formulation of the Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSP) which considers the minimization of energy consumption as one of the objectives. In practice, users experts in the problem domain but with a low knowledge in metaheuristics usually take an existing algorithm with default settings to optimize problem instances but, in this context, the use of automatic parameter configuration techniques can help to find ad-hoc configurations of algorithms that effectively solve optimization problems. Our aim is to study what improvement in results can be obtained by applying an autoconfiguration approach versus using a set of well-known multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (NSGA-II, SPEA2, SMS-EMOA and MOEA/D) for different instances of the JSP, with varying dimensionality. Our experiments showcase the potential of automated algorithmic configuration for energy-efficient production scheduling, producing better balanced solutions than the multi-objective solvers considered in the study.This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (grant PID2020-112540RB-C41, AEI/FEDER, UE) and the Basque Government (IT1456-22).Peer reviewe
An Exploratory Analysis on Users' Contributions in Federated Learning
No full textFederated Learning is an emerging distributed collaborative learning paradigm adopted by many of today's applications, e.g., keyboard prediction and object recognition. Its core principle is to learn from large amount of users data while preserving data privacy by design as collaborative users only need to share the machine learning models and keep data locally. The main challenge for such systems is to provide incentives to users to contribute high-quality models trained from their local data. In this paper, we aim to answer how well incentives recognize (in)accurate local models from honest and malicious users, and perceive their impacts on the model accuracy of federated learning systems. We first present a thorough survey on two contrasting perspectives: incentive mechanisms to measure the contribution of local models by honest users, and malicious users to deliberately degrade the overall model. We conduct simulation experiments to empirically demonstrate if existing contribution measurement schemes can disclose low-quality models from malicious users. Our results show there exists a clear tradeoff among measurement schemes in terms of the computational efficiency and effectiveness to distill the impact of malicious participants. We conclude this paper by discussing the research directions to design resilient contribution incentives.Data-Intensive System
Le POSSUM : un bon score pour prédire la mortalité du sujet âgé opéré en urgence?
No full textIntroduction: Le POSSUM (Physiologic and Operative Severity Score for the enUmeration of Mortality and morbidity) est un score prédictif de mortalité qui est largement utilisé en chirurgie aortique élective et abdominale. Le but de notre étude est une validation du POSSUM chez le sujet âgé (>70 ans) opéré pour une urgence digestive. Nous nous proposons d'étudier les meilleurs seuils du POSSUM, composé d'un score physiologique et d'un score opératoire, pour prédire la mortalité dans cette population. Méthodes: Il s'agit d'une étude rétrospective analytique de type cas témoin à partir d'une série de 291 patients d'âge ≥ 70 ans opérés pour une urgence digestive. Ces patients étaient répartis en deux groupes comportant 50 patients chacun. Le groupe "DC": patients décédés en post opératoire immédiat et le Groupe témoin "SURV" choisis par tirage au sort. Nous avons analysé la fiabilité du POSSUM pour prédire la mortalité et la morbidité. Par la suite, nous avons établi des courbes de ROC pour définir les seuils qui donnent le meilleur couple sensibilité/spécificité. Résultats: Le score physiologique, le score opératoire et les taux de morbidité et mortalité prédits par POSSUM et la mortalité prédit par P-POSSUM représentaient des facteurs prédictifs de mortalité (P <0,0001). Les valeurs seuils du score physiologique et du score opératoire qui donnent le meilleur couple sensibilité/spécificité, étaient respectivement de 23 et 15. Conclusion: Prédire la mortalité permet de cibler la prise en charge et d'informer le patient et sa famille des risques encourus.Pan African Medical Journal 2016; 2
