Search results for: Fang Tang

Authors: Hui-Fang Lee, Meng-Chu Liu, Wen-Chi Lu, Hsuan-Jung Hsieh

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The purpose of the study was to examine the effect of health program on the fitness ability of abnormal BMI students of Ching-Yun University of Science and Technology. In order to achieve this purpose, self-regulation theory and dietary education were applied, and the effect of 10-week sports activities and three-day diet records on pre-test and post-test of fitness activities was analyzed. There were 40 original participants. Then, nine people who were with normal BMI, low attendance or unfinished fitness test were eliminated from this research. The valid samples were 31 (77.5%) participants. The fitness activities included sit-bending, one minute sit-up, standing long jump, and three-minute stage boarding. The averages of three-day diet records were compared, and differences of pre-test and post-test of the four fitness activities were analyzed with paired-samples t test. The results showed that there was a significant difference between pre-test and post of male students’ BMI and one minute sit-up. Females’ sit-bending and one minute sit-up had the same effect. Females had high fat intake in three-day diet records. The research showed that the use of self-regulation theory and dietary education, the implementation of sports activities and three-day diet records could significantly enhance the physical fitness indicators or effects. While in the course of sports, we should guide students to think about the gap between self-behavior and ideal behavior, then realize the main reasons and improving methods, and finally go towards the goal and improve the effect of physical fitness.

Keywords: self-regulation theory, dietary education, three-day diet records, physical fitness

Procedia PDF Downloads 286

Authors: Chao Fang

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Due to the Confucian emphasis on filial piety and an undeveloped social welfare system in mainland China, adult children are both socially and legally obliged to care for their parents, including financial assistance and physical care as well as emotional and social support. Thus a family-centred care pattern for elderly people has been firmly established in China. However, because of the nationwide ‘One Child Policy’, over one million parents are excluded from such care because of the death of their only child and, therefore, their primary caregiver. Without their child’s support, these parents must manage the day to day challenges of growing old alone, with little support from society. By overturning established expectations of a ‘good’ elderly life, the loss of an only child may be accompanied by social and self-stigmatization, pushing these bereaved parents to the margin of society and threatening their economic, physical, emotional and social well-being. More importantly, since the One Child Policy was implemented from the late 1970s and early 1980s, the first generation of bereaved or ‘Shidu’ parents has reached an age at which those parents need elderly care. However, their predicament has been largely ignored. This paper reports on a qualitative interview study that found elderly care to be the main concern for Shidu parents’ everyday life. The paper identifies and discusses the concerns these bereaved parents raised about the prospect of having nowhere to turn at a time of increased need for financial, physical, social and emotional support in old age. The paper also identifies how Shidu parents have been coming together in grief and negotiate to make their predicament known to the government and wider society and to re-define their elderly life by rebuilding a sense of ‘family’.

Keywords: culture, bereavement, China, elderly care

Procedia PDF Downloads 254

Authors: Min Wu, Shuming Shen, Xuhong Yang, Rencheng Tang

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Every year, numerous organic wastes from fiber byproducts of the wool textile industry, poor quality raw wools not fit for spinning, horns, nails and feathers from butchery are disposed. These wastes are abundant in keratin which is a renewable material. Wool fiber/keratin/PVA composites with different proportions were prepared in this study, and the influence of the proportions on their structure and properties were studied, aiming to understand the potential application of keratin in the field of biomedicine, degradable wrapper, and cosmetics film, and provide a new way to reuse keratin wastes. The urea / sodium sulfide / sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) method was used to dissolve the wool. After filtration and dialysis, the wool keratin solution was achieved. Then the keratin solution and polyvinal (PVA) solution were blended in different proportions, and the wool fibers cut into a certain length were cast into the blended solution. Thereby, various wool fiber/keratin/PVA composite films with different proportions were formed through pouring the solution into a flat box and drying at room temperature. The surface morphology, molecular structure, and mechanical property of the composite films were studied. The results showed that, there are α-helix structure, β-sheet and random coil conformations in the pure keratin film, as well as in the wool fiber. Compared with wool fiber, the crystallinity of keratin decreased. PVA can obviously improve the mechanical property of the blended film. When the blended ratio of keratin and PVA is 20:80, the mechanical property of the blended film is greatly improved. The composite films with 8%-16% of wool fibers have better flexibility than those without wool fibers.

Keywords: composite film, keratin, mechanical property, morphological structure, PVA, wool fiber

Procedia PDF Downloads 257

Authors: Xuan Linh Nguyen, Tien Yin Chou, Yao Min Fang, Feng Cheng Lin, Thanh Van Hoang, Yin Min Huang

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In Vietnam, land use planning is the most important and powerful tool of the government for sustainable land use and land management. Nevertheless, many of land use planning locations are facing protests from surrounding households due to environmental impacts. In addition, locations are planned completely based on the subjective decisions of planners who are unsupported by tools or scientific methods. Hence, this research aims to assist the decision-makers in evaluating the rationality of planning locations by developing a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) using approaches of Geographic Information System (GIS)-based technology, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) multi-criteria-based technique and Fuzzy set theory. An ArcGIS Desktop add-ins named SDSS-LUPA was developed to support users analyzing data and presenting results in friendly format. The Fuzzy-AHP method has been utilized as analytic model for this SDSS. There are 18 planned locations in Hung Ha district (Thai Binh province, Vietnam) as a case study. The experimental results indicated that the assessment threshold higher than 0.65 while the 18 planned locations were irrational because of close to residential areas or close to water sources. Some potential sites were also proposed to the authorities for consideration of land use planning changes.

Keywords: analytic hierarchy process, fuzzy set theory, land use planning, spatial decision support system

Procedia PDF Downloads 344

Authors: Xinyuan Zou, Qihui Tang, Shujian Wang, Yulin Huang, Jie Gui, Xiangping Liu, Gang Liu, Yanqiang Tao

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Childhood trauma can have a long-lasting influence on individuals and contribute to mental disorders, including depression and anxiety. The current study aimed to explore the symptomatic and developmental patterns of depression, anxiety, and stress among adolescents who have suffered from childhood trauma. A total of 3,598 college students (female = 1,617 (44.94%), Mean Age = 19.68, SD Age = 1.35) in China completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) and the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scales (DASS-21), and 2,337 participants met the selection standard based on the cut-off scores of the CTQ. The symptomatic network and directed acyclic graph (DAG) network approaches were used. The results revealed that males reported experiencing significantly more physical abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, and sexual abuse compared to females. However, females scored significantly higher than males on all items of DASS-21, except for “Worthless”. No significant difference between the two genders was observed in the network structure and global strength. Meanwhile, among all participants, “Down-hearted” and “Agitated” appeared to be the most interconnected symptoms, the bridge symptoms in the symptom network, as well as the most vital symptoms in the DAG network. Apart from that, “No-relax” also served as the most prominent symptom in the DAG network. The results suggested that intervention targeted at assisting adolescents in developing more adaptive coping strategies with stress and regulating emotion could benefit the alleviation of comorbid depression, anxiety, and stress.

Keywords: symptom network, childhood trauma, depression, anxiety, stress

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Authors: Hui Zhang, Ye Tian, Fang Ye, Ziming Guo

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Communication signal modulation recognition technology is one of the key technologies in the field of modern information warfare. At present, communication signal automatic modulation recognition methods are mainly divided into two major categories. One is the maximum likelihood hypothesis testing method based on decision theory, the other is a statistical pattern recognition method based on feature extraction. Now, the most commonly used is a statistical pattern recognition method, which includes feature extraction and classifier design. With the increasingly complex electromagnetic environment of communications, how to effectively extract the features of various signals at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is a hot topic for scholars in various countries. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a feature extraction algorithm for the communication signal based on the improved Holder cloud feature. And the extreme learning machine (ELM) is used which aims at the problem of the real-time in the modern warfare to classify the extracted features. The algorithm extracts the digital features of the improved cloud model without deterministic information in a low SNR environment, and uses the improved cloud model to obtain more stable Holder cloud features and the performance of the algorithm is improved. This algorithm addresses the problem that a simple feature extraction algorithm based on Holder coefficient feature is difficult to recognize at low SNR, and it also has a better recognition accuracy. The results of simulations show that the approach in this paper still has a good classification result at low SNR, even when the SNR is -15dB, the recognition accuracy still reaches 76%.

Keywords: communication signal, feature extraction, Holder coefficient, improved cloud model

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Authors: Siwei Chang, Heng Li, Haitao Wu, Xin Fang

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Construction robots are receiving more and more attention as a promising solution to the manpower shortage issue in the construction industry. The development of intelligent control techniques that assist in controlling the robots to avoid transparency and reflected building obstacles is crucial for guaranteeing the adaptability and flexibility of mobile construction robots in complex construction environments. With the boom of computer vision techniques, a number of studies have proposed vision-based methods for transparent obstacle avoidance to improve operation accuracy. However, vision-based methods are also associated with disadvantages such as high computational costs. To provide better perception and value evaluation, this study aims to analyze the performance of vision-based techniques for avoiding transparent building obstacles. To achieve this, commonly used sensors, including a lidar, an ultrasonic sensor, and a USB camera, are equipped on the robotic platform to detect obstacles. A Raspberry Pi 3 computer board is employed to compute data collecting and control algorithms. The turtlebot3 burger is employed to test the programs. On-site experiments are carried out to observe the performance in terms of success rate and detection distance. Control variables include obstacle shapes and environmental conditions. The findings contribute to demonstrating how effectively vision-based obstacle avoidance strategies for transparent building obstacle avoidance and provide insights and informed knowledge when introducing computer vision techniques in the aforementioned domain.

Keywords: construction robot, obstacle avoidance, computer vision, transparent obstacle

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Authors: Fan Wei, Tang Yipeng

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Knowledge sharing is of great value to organizational performance and innovation ability. However, the mainstream research has focused largely on the impact of knowledge sharing at the team level on individuals and teams. There is a lack of empirical studies on how employees interact in the exchange of knowledge and its effect on employees’ own creative performance. Based on communication accommodation theory and social exchange theory, this article explores the construction of an employee knowledge interaction mechanism under the moderating of social status and introduces the leader's creativity expectation as a moderating variable to explore its cross-level moderating effect on employee knowledge sharing and their own creative performance. An empirical test was conducted on 36 teaching and research teams in the two primary schools, and the results showed that: (1) Explicit/tacit knowledge of employees is positively correlated with acquisition of explicit/tacit knowledge; (2) Colleagues’ evaluations of employees’ social status play a moderating role between the employees’ explicit/tacit knowledge and the acquisition of explicit/tacit knowledge. (3) The leadership creativity expectation positively regulates the relationship between the employees' explicit knowledge acquisition and creative performance. This research helps to open the "black box" of the interpersonal interaction mechanism of knowledge sharing and also provides an important theoretical basis and practical guidance for organizational managers to effectively stimulate employee knowledge sharing and creative performance.

Keywords: knowledge sharing, knowledge interaction, social status, leadership creativity expectations, creative performance

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Authors: Fang Yao, Minglei Chen

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City shrinkage is one of the thorny problems that many European cities have to face with nowadays. It is mainly expressed as the decrease of population in these cities. Eastern Germany is one of the pioneers of European shrinking cities with long shrinking history. Selecting one representative shrinking city Halle(Saale) in eastern Germany as research objective, collecting and investigating nearly 20 years (1993-2010) municipal data after the reunification of Germany. These data based on five dimensions, which are demographic, economic, social, spatial and environmental and total 16 eligible variables. Using Factor Analysis to dealing with these variables in order to assess the most important factors affecting shrinking Halle. The Factor Analysis shows that there are three main factors determine the shrinkage of Halle, namely demographical and economical factor, social stability factor, and city vitality factor. Three factors acts at different period of Halle’s shrinkage: from 1993 to 1997 the demographical and economical factor played an important role; from 1997 to 2004 the social stability is significant to city shrinkage; since 2005 city vitality factors determines the shrinkage of Halle. In recent years, the shrinkage in Halle mitigates that shows the sign of growing population. Thus the city Halle should focus on attaching more importance on the city vitality factor to prevent the city from shrinkage. Meanwhile, the city should possess a positive perspective that to shift the growth-oriented development to tap the potential of shrinking cities. This method is expected to apply to further research and other shrinking cities.

Keywords: demography, factor analysis, Halle, shrinking cities

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Authors: Nien-Ming Hong, Kuei-Fang Huang

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Climate change is an important issue in future, which seriously affects water resources for a long term planning and management. Flood assessment is highly related with climate and land use. Increasing rainfall and urbanization will induce the inundated area in future. For adapting the impacts of climate change, a land use planning is a good strategy for reducing flood damage. The study is to build a trade-off process with different land use types. The Ta-Liao watershed is the study area with three types of land uses that are build-up, farm and forest. The build-up area is concentrated in the downstream of the watershed. Different rainfall amounts are applied for assessing the land use in 1996, 2005 and 2013. The adapted strategies are based on retarding the development of urban and a trade-off process. When a land changes from farm area to built-up area in downstream, this study is to search for a farm area and change it to forest/grass area or building a retention area in the upstream. For assessing the effects of the strategy, the inundation area is simulated by the Flo-2D model with different rainfall conditions and land uses. The results show inundation maps of several cases with land use change planning. The results also show the trade-off strategies and retention areas can decrease the inundated area and divide the inundated area, which are better than retarding urban development. The land use change is usually non-reverse and the planning should be constructed before the climate change.

Keywords: climate change, land use change, flood risk assessment, land use planning

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Authors: Mui Joo Tang, Eang Teng Chan

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Advertising is commonly used to foster sales and reputation of an institution. It is at first the growth of print advertising that has increased the population and number of periodicals of newspaper and its circulation. The rise of Internet and online media has somehow blurred the role of media and advertising though the intention is still to reach out to audience and to increase sales. The relationship between advertising and audience on a product purchase through persuasion has been developing from print media to online media. From the changing media environment and audience, it is the concern of this research to study the impact of online advertising to such a relationship cycle. The content of online advertisements is much of text, multimedia, photo, audio and video. The messages of such content format may indeed bring impacts to its audience and its credibility. This study is therefore reflecting the effectiveness of online advertisement and its influences on generation Y in their purchasing behavior. This study uses Media Dependency Theory to analyze the relationship between the impact of online advertisement and media usage pattern of generation Y. Hierarchy of Effectiveness Model is used as a marketing communication model to study the effectiveness of advertising and further to determine the impact of online advertisement on generation Y in their purchasing decision making. This research uses online survey to reach out the sample of generation Y. The results have shown that online advertisements do not affect much on purchase decision making even though generation Y relies much on the media content including online advertisement for its information and believing in its credibility. There are few other external factors that may interrupt the effectiveness of online advertising. The very obvious influence of purchasing behavior is actually derived from the peers.

Keywords: generation Y, purchase decision, print media, online advertising, persuasion

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Authors: Ya-Chuan Tseng, Hsin-Yi Liu, Meei-Fang Lou, Guey-Shiun Huang

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Purpose: Sensory impairments are common in older adults. Hearing and visual impairments affect their physical and mental health and quality of life (QOL) adversely. However, systematic reviews of the relationship between hearing impairment, visual impairment, dual sensory impairment and quality of life are scarce. The purpose of this systematic review was to determine the relationship between hearing impairment, visual impairment, dual sensory impairment and quality of life. Methods: Searches of EMBASE, PubMed, CINAHL, MEDLINE, Cochrane Library and Airiti Library were conducted between January 2006 and December 2017 using the keywords ‘quality of life,’ ‘life satisfaction,’ ‘well-being,’ ‘hearing impairment’ and ‘visual impairment’ Two authors independently assessed methodologic quality using a modified Downs and Black tool. Data were extracted by the first author and then cross-checked by the second author. Results: Twenty-three studies consisting mostly of community-dwelling older adults were included in our review. Sensory impairment was found to be in significant association with quality of life, with an increase in hearing impairment or visual impairment severity resulting in a lower quality of life. Quality of life for dual sensory impairment was worse than for hearing impairment or visual impairment individually. Conclusions: A significant association was confirmed between hearing impairment, visual impairment, dual sensory impairment and quality of life. Our review can be used to enhance health care personnel’s understanding of sensory impairment in older adults and enable healthcare personnel to actively assess older adults’ sensory functions so that they can help alleviate the negative impact of sensory impairments on QOL in older adults.

Keywords: nursing, older adults, quality of life, systematic review, hearing impairment, visual impairment

Procedia PDF Downloads 195

Authors: Meiju Chen, Chaoyu Guo, Chia Wei Tang

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The present study's purpose is twofold: first, to construct indicators for learning-oriented school education and, second, to conduct a survey to examine how learning-oriented education has been implemented in junior high schools after the launch of the 12-year compulsory curriculum. For indicator system construction, we compiled relevant literature to develop a preliminary indicator list model and then conducted two rounds of a questionnaire survey to gain comprehensive feedback from experts to finalize our indicator model. In the survey's first round, 12 experts were invited to evaluate the indicators' appropriateness. Based on the experts' consensus, we determined our final indicator list and used it to develop the Fuzzy Delphi questionnaire to finalize the indicator system and each indicator's relative value. For the fact-finding survey, we collected 454 valid samples to examine how the concept of learning-oriented education is adopted and implemented in the junior high school context. We also used this data in our importance-performance analysis to explore the strengths and weaknesses of school education in Taiwan. The results suggest that the indicator system for learning-oriented school education must consist of seven dimensions and 34 indicators. Among the seven dimensions, 'student learning' and 'curriculum planning and implementation' are the most important yet underperforming dimensions that need immediate improvement. We anticipate that the indicator system will be a useful tool for other countries' evaluation of schools' performance in learning-oriented education.

Keywords: learning-oriented education, school education, fuzzy Delphi method, importance-performance analysis

Procedia PDF Downloads 115

Authors: Suwattana Visetnan, Premruethai Supungul, Sureerat Tang, Ikuo Hirono, Anchalee Tassanakajon, Vichien Rimphanitchayakit

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In animals, infection by Gram-negative bacteria and certain viruses activates the Imd signaling pathway wherein the a NF-κB transcription factor, Relish, is a key regulatory protein for the synthesis of antimicrobial proteins. Infection by yellow head virus (YHV) activates the Imd pathway. To investigate the expression of genes involved in YHV infection and under the influence of PmRelish regulation, RNA interference and suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) are employed. The genes in forward library expressed in shrimp after YHV infection and under the activity of PmRelish were obtained by subtracting the cDNAs from YHV-infected and PmRelish-knockdown shrimp with cDNAs from YHV-infected shrimp. Opposite subtraction gave a reverse library whereby an alternative set of genes under YHV infection and no PmRelish expression was obtained. Sequencing of 252 and 99 cDNA clones from the respective forward and reverse libraries were done and annotated through blast search against the GenBank sequences. Genes involved in defense and homeostasis were abundant in both libraries, 31% and 23% in the forward and reverse libraries, respectively. They were predominantly antimicrobial proteins, proteinases and proteinase inhibitors. The expression of antimicrobial protein genes, ALFPm3, crustinPm1, penaeidin3 and penaeidin5 were tested under PmRelish silencing and Gram-negative bacterium V. harveyi infection. Together with the results previously reported, the expression of penaeidin5 and also penaeidin3 but not ALFPm3 and crustinPm1 were under the regulation of PmRelish in the Imd pathway.

Keywords: relish, yellow head virus, penaeus monodon, antimicrobial proteins

Procedia PDF Downloads 185

Authors: Geng Xiangren, Liu Lei, Gui Ye-Wei, Tang Wei, Wang An-ling

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The malfunction of thermal protection system (TPS) caused by aerodynamic heating is a latent trouble to aircraft structure safety. Accurately predicting the structure temperature field is quite important for the TPS design of hypersonic vehicle. Since Thornton’s work in 1988, the coupled method of aerodynamic heating and heat transfer has developed rapidly. However, little attention has been paid to the influence of structural deformation on aerodynamic heating and structural temperature field. In the flight, especially the long-endurance flight, the structural deformation, caused by the aerodynamic heating and temperature rise, has a direct impact on the aerodynamic heating and structural temperature field. Thus, the coupled interaction cannot be neglected. In this paper, based on the method of static aero-thermo-elasticity, considering the influence of aero-thermo-elasticity deformation, the aerodynamic heating and heat transfer coupled results of hypersonic vehicle wing model were calculated. The results show that, for the low-curvature region, such as fuselage or center-section wing, structure deformation has little effect on temperature field. However, for the stagnation region with high curvature, the coupled effect is not negligible. Thus, it is quite important for the structure temperature prediction to take into account the effect of elastic deformation. This work has laid a solid foundation for improving the prediction accuracy of the temperature distribution of aircraft structures and the evaluation capacity of structural performance.

Keywords: aerothermoelasticity, elastic deformation, structural temperature, multi-field coupling

Procedia PDF Downloads 313

Authors: Chan Eang Teng, Tang Mui Joo

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In the beginning of the prevalence of social media, it would be an obvious trend that the young adult age group has the highest population among the users on social media. However, apart from the age group of the users are becoming younger and younger, the elderly group has become a new force on social media, and this age group has increased rapidly. On top of that, the influence of social media towards the elderly is becoming more significant and it is even trending among them. This is because basic computer knowledge is not instilled into their life when they were young. This age group tends to be engrossed more than the young as this is something new for them, and they have the mindset that it is a new platform to approach things, and they tend to be more engrossed when they start getting in touch with the social media. Generally, most of the social media has been accepted and accessed by teenagers and young adult, but it is reasonable to believe that the social media is not really accepted among the elderly. Surprisingly, the elderlies are more addicted to the social media than the teenagers. Therefore, this study is to determine and understand the relationship between the elderly and social media, and how they employ social media in their lives. An online survey on 200 elderly aged 45-80 and an interview with a media expert are conducted to answer the main questions in the research paper. Uses and Gratification Approach is employed in theoretical framework. Finding revealed that majority of the respondents use social media to connect with family, friends, and for leisure purposes. The finding concluded that the elderly use social media differently according to their needs and wants which is in par with the highlight of Uses and Gratification theory. Considering the significantly large role social media plays in our culture and daily life today, the finding will shed some light on the effect of social media on the elderly or senior citizens who are usually relegated into a minority group in today’s age where the internet and social media are of great importance to our society and humanity in general. This may also serve to be useful in understanding behavioral patterns and preference in terms of social media usage among the elderly.

Keywords: elderly, Facebook, Malaysia, social media

Procedia PDF Downloads 331

Authors: Kim H. K. Choy, Oliva H. K. Chu, W. Y. Keung, B. Lim, Winnie P. Y. Tang

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Background: Health care providers have been identified as an at-risk group for obesity. Mobile health technology can be used to motivate lifestyle behavioral changes. The aim of this study was to investigate hospital-based health care providers’ perceptions of mHealth Workplace Nutrition Wellness Program. Methods: This qualitative study was conducted at a regional hospital in Hong Kong. Ten health care providers were purposively selected for the study. Qualitative data was collected by individual face-to-face semi-structured interviews which were audio-taped, transcribed verbatim and analyzed by thematic analysis. Results: Four themes were identified: (1) mobile health technology motivates lifestyle changes, (2) self-perceived body weight initiates health behavioral changes, (3) organizational support promotes healthy behavior, (4) lack of self-confidence hinders lifestyle modification. The health care providers’ perceptions of mobile health technology, barriers, and facilitators to participation in the mHealth Workplace Nutrition Wellness Program were discussed in the study. Conclusions: Barriers, facilitators, self-perceived body weight and experiences of mobile health technology were associated with intention of participation in mHealth Workplace Nutrition Wellness Program. The knowledge generated from the study could be used to guide the design and implementation of effective interventions, strategies and policies of workplace wellness programs to promote participation for hospital’s employees.

Keywords: workplace wellness program, mobile health, barriers, facilitators, qualitative

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Authors: Hannah K. M. Tang, Muhammad Ateeq, Mark J. Lake, Badr Abdullah, Frederic A. Bezombes

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Based on a theoretical assessment of current literature, virtual reality (VR) could help to treat sporting injuries in a number of ways. However, it is important to obtain rehabilitation specialists’ perspectives in order to design, develop and validate suitable content for a VR application focused on treatment. Subsequently, a one-day observation and interview study focused on the use of VR for the treatment of lower limb musculoskeletal conditions in athletes was conducted at St George’s Park England National Football Centre with rehabilitation specialists. The current paper established the methods suitable for obtaining practitioner’s viewpoints through observation and interview in this context. Particular detail was provided regarding the method of qualitatively processing interview results using the qualitative data analysis software tool NVivo, in order to produce a narrative of overarching themes. The observations and overarching themes identified could be used as a framework and success criteria of a VR application developed in future research. In conclusion, this work explained the methods deemed suitable for obtaining practitioner’s viewpoints through observation and interview. This was required in order to highlight characteristics and features of a VR application designed to treat lower limb musculoskeletal injury of athletes and could be built upon to direct future work.

Keywords: athletes, lower-limb musculoskeletal injury, rehabilitation, return-to-sport, virtual reality

Procedia PDF Downloads 219

Authors: Dhruv J. Limaye, Hanga Galfalvy, Cheick A. Sissoko, Yung-yu Huang, Chunanning Tang, Ying Liu, Shu-Chi Hsiung, Andrew J. Dwork, Gorazd B. Rosoklija, Victoria Arango, Lewis Brown, J. John Mann, Maura Boldrini

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Memory and emotion require hippocampal cell viability and connectivity and are disrupted in major depressive disorder (MDD). Applying shotgun proteomics and stereological quantification of neural progenitor cells (NPCs), intermediate neural progenitors (INPs), and mature granule neurons (GNs), to postmortem human hippocampus, identified differentially expressed proteins (DEPs), and fewer NPCs, INPs and GNs, in untreated MDD (uMDD) compared with non-psychiatric controls (CTRL) and antidepressant-treated MDD (MDDT). DEPs lower in uMDD vs. CTRL promote mitosis, differentiation, and prevent apoptosis. DEPs higher in uMDD vs. CTRL inhibit the cell cycle, and regulate cell adhesion, neurite outgrowth, and DNA repair. DEPs lower in MDDT vs. uMDD block cell proliferation. We observe group-specific correlations between numbers of NPCs, INPs, and GNs and an abundance of proteins regulating mitosis, differentiation, and apoptosis. Altered protein expression underlies hippocampus cellular and volume loss in uMDD, supports a trophic effect of antidepressants, and offers new treatment targets.

Keywords: proteomics, hippocampus, depression, mitosis, migration, differentiation, mitochondria, apoptosis, antidepressants, human brain

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Authors: Haifeng Zhou, Tsungyang Liow, Xiaoguang Tu, Eujin Lim, Chao Li, Junfeng Song, Xianshu Luo, Ying Huang, Lianxi Jia, Lianwee Luo, Qing Fang, Mingbin Yu, Guoqiang Lo

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With the development of technology, countries gradually allocated more and more frequency spectrums for civilization and commercial usage, especially those high radio frequency bands indicating high information capacity. The field effect becomes more and more prominent in microwave components as frequency increases, which invalidates the transmission line theory and complicate the design of microwave components. Here a modeling approach based on numerical search algorithm is proposed to design various building blocks for microwave circuits to avoid complicated impedance matching and equivalent electrical circuit approximation. Concretely, a microwave component is discretized to a set of segments along the microwave propagation path. Each of the segment is initialized with random dimensions, which constructs a multiple-dimension parameter space. Then numerical searching algorithms (e.g. Pattern search algorithm) are used to find out the ideal geometrical parameters. The optimal parameter set is achieved by evaluating the fitness of S parameters after a number of iterations. We had adopted this approach in our current projects and designed many microwave components including sharp bends, T-branches, Y-branches, microstrip-to-stripline converters and etc. For example, a stripline 90° bend was designed in 2.54 mm x 2.54 mm space for dual-band operation (Ka band and Ku band) with < 0.18 dB insertion loss and < -55 dB reflection. We expect that this approach can enrich the tool kits for microwave designers.

Keywords: microwave component, microstrip and stripline, bend, power division, the numerical search algorithm.

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Authors: Chih-Yi Ho, Tzu-Fang Chang, Chih-Chia Huang, Chia-Yen Lee

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In dental clinics, the dentists use the periapical radiography image to assess the effectiveness of endodontic treatment of teeth with chronic apical periodontitis. Periapical radiography images are taken at different times to assess alveolar bone variation before and after the root canal treatment, and furthermore to judge whether the treatment was successful. Current clinical assessment of apical tissue recovery relies only on dentist personal experience. It is difficult to have the same standard and objective interpretations due to the dentist or radiologist personal background and knowledge. If periapical radiography images at the different time could be registered well, the endodontic treatment could be evaluated. In the image registration area, it is necessary to assign representative control points to the transformation model for good performances of registration results. However, detection of representative control points (feature points) on periapical radiography images is generally very difficult. Regardless of which traditional detection methods are practiced, sufficient feature points may not be detected due to the low-contrast characteristics of the x-ray image. Barnard detector is an algorithm for feature point detection based on grayscale value gradients, which can obtain sufficient feature points in the case of gray-scale contrast is not obvious. However, the Barnard detector would detect too many feature points, and they would be too clustered. This study uses the local extrema of clustering feature points and the suppression radius to overcome the problem, and compared different feature point detection methods. In the preliminary result, the feature points could be detected as representative control points by the proposed method.

Keywords: feature detection, Barnard detector, registration, periapical radiography image, endodontic treatment

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Authors: Po-Jung Huang, Chi-Ching Lee, Bertrand Chin-Ming Tan, Yuan-Ming Yeh, Julie Lichieh Chu, Tin-Wen Chen, Cheng-Yang Lee, Ruei-Chi Gan, Hsuan Liu, Petrus Tang

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Whole-exome sequencing focuses on the protein coding regions of disease/cancer associated genes based on a priori knowledge is the most cost-effective method to study the association between genetic alterations and disease. Recent advances in high throughput sequencing technologies and proteomic techniques has provided an opportunity to integrate genomics and proteomics, allowing readily detectable mutated peptides corresponding to mutated genes. Since sequence database search is the most widely used method for protein identification using Mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics technology, a mutant proteome database is required to better approximate the real protein pool to improve disease-associated mutated protein identification. Large-scale whole exome/genome sequencing studies were launched by National Cancer Institute (NCI), Broad Institute, and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), which provide not only a comprehensive report on the analysis of coding variants in diverse samples cell lines but a invaluable resource for extensive research community. No existing database is available for the collection of mutant protein sequences related to the identified variants in these studies. CMPD is designed to address this issue, serving as a bridge between genomic data and proteomic studies and focusing on protein sequence-altering variations originated from both germline and cancer-associated somatic variations.

Keywords: TCGA, cancer, mutant, proteome

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Authors: Bing-Fang Lee, Srinivasan Periasamy, Ming-Yie Liu

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Shift work sleep disorder is a common problem in industrialized world. It is a type of circadian rhythmic sleep disorders characterized by insomnia and sleep deprivation. Lack of sleep in workers may lead to poor health conditions such as hepatic dysfunction. Melatonin is a hormone secreted by the pineal gland to alleviate insomnia. Moreover, it is a powerful antioxidant and may prevent acute liver injury. Therefore, workers take in melatonin to deal with sleep-related health is an important issue. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of melatonin on an acute hepatic injury model sinusoidal obstruction syndrome (SOS) in mice. Male C57BL/6 mice were injected with a single dose (500 mg/kg) of monocrotaline (MCT) to induce SOS. Melatonin (1, 3, 10 and 30 mg/kg) was injected 1 h before MCT treatment. After 24 h of MCT treatment, mice were sacrificed. The blood and liver were collected. Organ damage was evaluated by serum biochemistry, hematology analyzer, and histological examination. Low doses of melatonin (1 and 3 mg/kg) had no protective effect on SOS. However, high doses (10 and 30 mg/kg) exacerbated SOS. In addition, it not only increased serum glutamate oxaloacetate transaminase (GOT), glutamate pyruvate transaminase (GPT) and extended liver damage indicated by histological examination but also decreased platelet levels, lymphocyte ratio, and glutathione level; it had no effect on malondialdehyde and nitric oxide level in SOS mice. To conclude, melatonin may exacerbate MCT-induced SOS in mice. Furthermore, melatonin might have a synergistic action with SOS. Usage of melatonin for insomnia by people working in long shift must be cautioned; it might cause acute hepatic injury.

Keywords: acute liver injury, melatonin, shift work, sleep deprivation

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Authors: Y. S. Zhou, C. R. Li, L. L. Tang, C. X. Gao, D. J. Wang, Y. Y. Guo

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Triangular trihedral corner reflector (CR) has been widely used as point target for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) calibration and image quality assessment. The additional “tip” of the triangular plate does not contribute to the reflector’s theoretical RCS and if it interacts with a perfectly reflecting ground plane, it will yield an increase of RCS at the radar bore-sight and decrease the accuracy of SAR calibration and image quality assessment. Regarding this problem, two types of CRs were manufactured. One was the hexagonal trihedral CR. It is a self-illuminating CR with relatively small plate edge length, while large edge length usually introduces unexpected edge diffraction error. The other was the triangular trihedral CR with extended bottom plate which considers the effect of ‘tip’ into the total RCS. In order to assess the performance of the two types of new CRs, flight campaign over the National Calibration and Validation Site for High Resolution Remote Sensors was carried out. Six hexagonal trihedral CRs and two bottom-extended trihedral CRs, as well as several traditional triangular trihedral CRs, were deployed. KOMPSAT-5 X-band SAR image was acquired for the performance analysis of the hexagonal trihedral CRs. C-band airborne SAR images were acquired for the performance analysis of the bottom-extended trihedral CRs. The analysis results showed that the impulse response function of both the hexagonal trihedral CRs and bottom-extended trihedral CRs were much closer to the ideal sinc-function than the traditional triangular trihedral CRs. The flight campaign results validated the advantages of new types of CRs and they might be useful in the future SAR calibration mission.

Keywords: synthetic aperture radar, calibration, corner reflector, KOMPSAT-5

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Authors: Yao Jiajia, Wu Guanlin, LIU Fang, Xue Junshuai, Zhang Jincheng, Hao Yue

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Resonant tunneling diodes (RTDs) based on GaN have been extensively studied. However, no results of multiple logic states achieved by RTDs were reported by the methods of epitaxy in the GaN materials. In this paper, the multiple negative-differential resistance regions by combining two discrete double-barrier RTDs in series have been first demonstrated. Plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy (PA-MBE) was used to grow structures consisting of two vertical RTDs. The substrate was a GaN-on-sapphire template. Each resonant tunneling structure was composed of a double barrier of AlN and a single well of GaN with undoped 4-nm space layers of GaN on each side. The AlN barriers were 1.5 nm thick, and the GaN well was 2 nm thick. The resonant tunneling structures were separated from each other by 30-nm thick n+ GaN layers. The bottom and top layers of the structures, grown neighboring to the spacer layers that consist of 200-nm-thick n+ GaN. These devices with two tunneling structures exhibited uniform peaks and valleys current and also had two negative differential resistance NDR regions equally spaced in bias voltage. The current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of resonant tunneling structures with diameters of 1 and 2 μm were analyzed in this study. These structures exhibit three stable operating points, which are investigated in detail. This research demonstrates that using molecular beam epitaxy MBE to vertically grow multiple resonant tunneling structures is a promising method for achieving multiple negative differential resistance regions and stable logic states. These findings have significant implications for the development of digital circuits capable of multi-value logic, which can be achieved with a small number of devices.

Keywords: GaN, AlN, RTDs, MBE, logic state

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Authors: Wenbo Wang, Yi-Fang Brook Wu

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The spread of misinformation and disinformation has become a major concern, particularly with the rise of social media as a primary source of information for many people. As a means to address this phenomenon, automated fact-checking has emerged as a safeguard against the spread of misinformation and disinformation. Existing fact-checking approaches aim to determine whether a news claim is true or false, and they have achieved decent veracity prediction accuracy. However, the state-of-the-art methods rely on manually verified external information to assist the checking model in making judgments, which requires significant human resources. This study introduces a framework, SAC, which focuses on 1) augmenting the representation of a claim by incorporating additional context using general-purpose, comprehensive, and authoritative data; 2) developing a search function to automatically select relevant, new, and credible references; 3) focusing on the important parts of the representations of a claim and its reference that are most relevant to the fact-checking task. The experimental results demonstrate that 1) Augmenting the representations of claims and references through the use of a knowledge base, combined with the multi-head attention technique, contributes to improved performance of fact-checking. 2) SAC with auto-selected references outperforms existing fact-checking approaches with manual selected references. Future directions of this study include I) exploring knowledge graphs in Wikidata to dynamically augment the representations of claims and references without introducing too much noise, II) exploring semantic relations in claims and references to further enhance fact-checking.

Keywords: fact checking, claim verification, deep learning, natural language processing

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Authors: Meng-Chyi Wu, Bonn Lin, Jyun-Hao Liao, Chein-Ju Chen, Yu-Cheng Jhuang, Mau-Phon Houng, Fang-Hsing Wang, Min-Chu Liu, Cheng-Fu Yang, Cheng-Shong Hong

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Since the use of wireless communications has become critical nowadays, the available RF spectrum has become limited. Ultraviolet (UV) communication system can alleviate the spectrum constraint making UV communication system a potential alternative to future communication demands. Also, UV links can provide faster communication rate and can be used in combination with existing RF communication links, providing new communications diversity with higher user capacity. The UV region of electromagnetic spectrum has been of interest to detector, imaging and communication technologies because the stratospheric ozone layer effectively absorbs some solar UV radiation from reaching the earth surface. The wavebands where most of UV radiation is absorbed by the ozone are commonly known as the solar blind region. By operating in UV-C band (200-280 nm) the communication system can minimize the transmission power consumption since it will have less radiation noise. UV communication uses the UV ray as the medium. Electric signal is carried on this band after being modulated and then be transmitted within the atmosphere as channel. Though the background noise of UV-C communication is very low owing to the solar-blind feature, it leads to a large propagation loss. The 370 nm UV provides a much lower propagation loss than that the UV-C does and the recent device technology for UV source on this band is more mature. The fabricated 370 nm AlGaN light-emitting diodes (LEDs) with an aperture size of 45 m exhibit a modulation bandwidth of 165 MHz at 30 mA and a high power of 7 W/cm2 at 230 A/cm2. In order to solve the problem of low power in single UV LED, a UV LED array is presented in.

Keywords: ultraviolet (UV) communication, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), modulation bandwidth, LED array, 370 nm

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Authors: Hu Ding, Kai Liu, Guoan Tang

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The Chinese Loess Plateau suffers from serious gully erosion induced by natural and human causes. Gully features detection including gully-affected area and its two dimension parameters (length, width, area et al.), is a significant task not only for researchers but also for policy-makers. This study aims at gully-affected area detection in three catchments of Chinese Loess Plateau, which were selected in Changwu, Ansai, and Suide by using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The methodology includes a sequence of UAV data generation, image segmentation, feature calculation and selection, and random forest classification. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the influences of segmentation strategy and feature selection. Results showed that vertical and horizontal root-mean-square errors were below 0.5 and 0.2 m, respectively, which were ideal for the Loess Plateau region. The segmentation strategy adopted in this paper, which considers the topographic information, and optimal parameter combination can improve the segmentation results. Besides, the overall extraction accuracy in Changwu, Ansai, and Suide achieved was 84.62%, 86.46%, and 93.06%, respectively, which indicated that the proposed method for detecting gully-affected area is more objective and effective than traditional methods. This study demonstrated that UAV can bridge the gap between field measurement and satellite-based remote sensing, obtaining a balance in resolution and efficiency for catchment-scale gully erosion research.

Keywords: unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), object-analysis image analysis, gully erosion, gully-affected area, Loess Plateau, random forest

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Authors: Yumeng Ma, Fang Wang, Jinxia Huang

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Researchers put forward higher requirements for efficient acquisition and utilization of domain knowledge in the big data era. As literature is an effective way for researchers to quickly and accurately understand the research situation in their field, the knowledge discovery based on literature has become a new research method. As a tool to organize and manage knowledge in a specific domain, the subject knowledge base can be used to mine and present the knowledge behind the literature to meet the users' personalized needs. This study designs the construction route of the subject knowledge base for specific research problems. Information extraction method based on knowledge engineering is adopted. Firstly, the subject knowledge model is built through the abstraction of the research elements. Then under the guidance of the knowledge model, extraction rules of knowledge points are compiled to analyze, extract and correlate entities, relations, and attributes in literature. Finally, a database platform based on this structured knowledge is developed that can provide a variety of services such as knowledge retrieval, knowledge browsing, knowledge q&a, and visualization correlation. Taking the construction practices in the field of activating blood circulation and removing stasis as an example, this study analyzes how to construct subject knowledge base based on literature knowledge extraction. As the system functional test shows, this subject knowledge base can realize the expected service scenarios such as a quick query of knowledge, related discovery of knowledge and literature, knowledge organization. As this study enables subject knowledge base to help researchers locate and acquire deep domain knowledge quickly and accurately, it provides a transformation mode of knowledge resource construction and personalized precision knowledge services in the data-intensive research environment.

Keywords: knowledge model, literature knowledge extraction, precision knowledge services, subject knowledge base

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Authors: Yue Sun, Yuan Wang

Abstract:

The Grand Canal of China has been in use for more than two thousand years. It runs through the central and eastern regions of China and communicates with the five major river systems of Haihe River, Yellow River, Huaihe River, Yangtze River and Qiantang River from north to south. It is a complex, systematic and comprehensive water conservancy project in the period of agricultural civilization and includes the three parts of the Beijing-Hangzhou Canal, the Sui and Tang Dynasties Canal and the Eastern Zhejiang Canal. It covers eight provinces and cities including Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Henan and Anhui. The Grand Canal is an important channel connecting the Central Plains and the Beijing-Hangzhou Canal, and it is also an important waterway trade channel. Nowadays, although the Grand Canal no longer bears the burden of communicating water transportation between the north and the south, the site of the Grand Canal is still a “historical museum” of the lifestyle of people who lived on the canal from the Ming and Qing Dynasties to the Republic of China. By means of literature reading and field investigation, this paper compares the different protection strategies of the Grand Canal in the region between the ancient villages of Huaxian and Xunxian, which witness the vicissitudes of canal water transport, to explore whether the protective renovation of historical and cultural routes is “protection” or “destruction”, and puts forward some protection suggestions.

Keywords: The Grand Canal, heritage conservation, cultural route, ancient villages, strategies

Procedia PDF Downloads 132