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Documentation is the chief approach for conserving indigenous traditional knowledge. Traditional foods form an integral part of the diets of indigenous people all over the world. The indigenous techniques for rice-based foods in the North-eastern region of India have not been documented systematically. The North-eastern region is made up of eight states: Meghalaya, Assam, Tripura, Mizoram, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Manipur, each with its own food habits and social distinctiveness. Rice cakes are well-known in the North-east region and are mainly consumed during tea time, ceremonies, festivals, and other occasions. This study was performed through direct interview and observation, which signifies the distinct features in the preparation of rice cakes and the limitation of knowledge merely to domestic level. It also describes the techniques of rice cake production, which have few similarities among different states. This study recommends the need to upgrade, preserve, and document indigenous knowledge to promote rice cakes for better marketing and, more importantly, to attempt to conserve these products through general awareness. In addition, several health benefits of rice cake products have been discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, an ethnic fermented rice beverage- ‘Chubitchi’ from Garo Hills region of Meghalaya was closely monitored and was improvised with well characterised Lactobacillus and Saccharomyces strains to develop a product similar to it under laboratory conditions. A comparative analysis between the traditionally made and laboratory-made rice beverage was made to assess their storage period and bio-functional properties up to 40 days. During the organoleptic evaluation based on the scores of all sensory attributes, the laboratory-made rice beverage was acceptable till day 30 and the traditionally made rice beverage was acceptable till day 20. A decrease in pH and increase in acidity (%) with increase in fermentation time was observed for both rice beverage types. An initial rise in ethanol percentage was also witnessed with increase in fermentation time till day 20 for both the rice beverage types. The ACE inhibitory property of laboratory-made Chubitchi enhanced from 22.64% at day 0 to 86.87% at day 20 followed by a reduction at day 30 (68.04%). The antioxidative activity was highest at day 0 (95.18%) followed by lowering down at day 10 (81.59%). The laboratory prepared Chubitchi showed rapid reduction in the polyphenol content and high antimicrobial activity against major test organisms during the storage study. The results show longer storage period and higher ACE-inhibition, antioxidative, total phenol reduction and antimicrobial activity of the laboratory prepared Chubitchi against the traditional made. This study could further provide the rural tribes of Garo Hills with well-defined novel starter cultures as well as optimized procedure for rice beverage development with numerous health benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Samples of synthetic industrial essential oil (SIEO) were assayed to provide basis for establishing correlation and validation of claims of its density, disinfectant and germicidal properties with its natural counterparts. Specific gravity (SG) and antibacterial assays were carried out on twenty typical SIEO samples that are commonly used in Northern Nigeria. The results show that mean SG was 0.970 with 5% coefficient of variance (CV) between samples and was not statistically significant following Kolmogorov-Smirnov error protection at 95% confidence limit. Antimicrobial activity test results consisting of bioautography and minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) tests present variable effects of the SIEO S. aureus and E. coli but are not completely dependent on each other. Generally, the results of SG determinations for SIEO correspond greatly with SG values of most natural essential oils extracts and that up 70% SIEO showed antibacterial activity. The SIEO studied like their natural counterpart may contain certain antibacterial agents with similar effects to standard Chloramphenicol used in this work. However, further studies are required to justify the safety of the application of SIEO as antimicrobial agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present an accurate and robust pose estimator of rigid, polyhedral objects, based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), as suitable for Automated Visual Inspection (AVI) applications. The estimator is novel in the sense that it is trained with different poses of the objects having dimensional deviations within its tolerance range and is therefore robust with respect to within tolerance dimensional errors. The estimation accuracy is scalable and our computer simulation experiments in the existing configurations of ANNs have shown an accuracy better than 4% of the placement error. The ANN based pose estimator offers several advantages over the classical implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]