Development and validation of the short-form Adolescent Health Promotion Scale.

BACKGROUND: Health-promoting lifestyle choices of adolescents are closely related to current and subsequent health status. However, parsimonious yet reliable and valid screening tools are scarce. The original 40-item adolescent health promotion (AHP) scale was developed by our research team and has been applied to measure adolescent health-promoting behaviors worldwide. The aim of our study was to examine the psychometric properties of a newly developed short-form version of the AHP (AHP-SF) including tests of its reliability and validity. METHODS: The study was conducted in nine middle and high schools in southern Taiwan. Participants were 814 adolescents randomly divided into two subgroups with equal size and homogeneity of baseline characteristics. The first subsample (calibration sample) was used to modify and shorten the factorial model while the second subsample (validation sample) was utilized to validate the result obtained from the first one. The psychometric testing of the AHP-SF included internal reliability of McDonald's omega and Cronbach's alpha, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and construct validity with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). RESULTS: The results of the CFA supported a six-factor model and 21 items were retained in the AHP-SF with acceptable model fit. For the discriminant validity test, results indicated that adolescents with lower AHP-SF scores were more likely to be overweight or obese, skip breakfast, and spend more time watching TV and playing computer games. The AHP-SF also showed excellent internal consistency with a McDonald's omega of 0.904 (Cronbach's alpha 0.905) in the calibration group. CONCLUSION: The current findings suggest that the AHP-SF is a valid and reliable instrument for the evaluation of adolescent health-promoting behaviors. Primary health care providers and clinicians can use the AHP-SF to assess these behaviors and evaluate the outcome of health promotion programs in the adolescent population

Catastrophic Emission of Charges from Near-Extremal Nariai Black Holes

Using the in-out formalism and also the monodromy method, we study the emission of charges from near-extremal charged Nariai black holes with the black hole and cosmological horizons close to each other. The emission becomes catastrophic for a charge with energy greater than its chemical potential, whose leading exponential factor increases inversely proportional to the separation of two horizons. This implies that near-extremal Nariai black holes quickly evaporate through the charge emission and end in the de Sitter space, in contrast to near-extremal RN-dS black holes that have the Breitenlohner-Friedman bound below which they become stable against Hawking radiation and Schwinger effect of charge emission. We illuminate the origin of the catastrophic emission in the phase-integral formulation by comparing near-extremal charged Nariai black holes with near-extremal RN-dS black holes.Comment: 15 page

Television Meets Facebook: The Correlation between TV Ratings and Social Media

Abstract This study examines the relationship between social media site Facebook and TV ratings drawing from audience factors of integration model of audience behavior. Based on context of Taiwan television network programs, this study collected measures for Facebook likes, shares, comments, posts for three genres of television shows and their Nielsen ratings over a period of eleven weeks, resulting in the size of sample more than 130 observations. This study applied multiple regression models and determined that the key social media measures correlate with TV ratings. In essence, TV shows with higher number of posts and engagement are likely to relate to higher ratings, special in drama shows. Subsequently, this study constructed the TV prediction models with measures for Facebook via SVR. The results suggested that prediction models are a good forecasting of which MAPE was between 10% -20%, even less than 10%. This implies that TV network should be motivated to invest in social media and engage their audience and analysts can use social media as a mechanism of exante forecasting

Determination of band alignment in the single layer MoS2/WSe2 heterojunction

The emergence of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) as 2D electronic materials has stimulated proposals of novel electronic and photonic devices based on TMD heterostructures. Here we report the determination of band offsets in TMD heterostructures by using microbeam X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy ({\mu}-XPS) and scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/S). We determine a type-II alignment between $\textrm{MoS}_2$ and $\textrm{WSe}_2$ with a valence band offset (VBO) value of 0.83 eV and a conduction band offset (CBO) of 0.76 eV. First-principles calculations show that in this heterostructure with dissimilar chalcogen atoms, the electronic structures of $\textrm{WSe}_2$ and $\textrm{MoS}_2$ are well retained in their respective layers due to a weak interlayer coupling. Moreover, a VBO of 0.94 eV is obtained from density functional theory (DFT), consistent with the experimental determination.Comment: ^ These authors contributed equally. *Corresponding author E-mail: [email protected], [email protected] 20 pages, 4 figures in main tex

All-Trans Retinoic Acid Induces DU145 Cell Cycle Arrest through Cdk5 Activation

All-trans retinoic acid (ATRA), the active form of vitamin A, plays an important role in the growth arrest of numerous types of cancer cells. It has been indicated that cyclin-dependent kinase 5 (Cdk5) activity can be affected by ATRA treatment. Our previous results demonstrate the involvement of Cdk5 in the fate of prostate cancer cells. The purpose of this study is to examine whether Cdk5 is involved in ATRA-induced growth arrest of the castration-resistant cancer cell line DU145 through up-regulating Cdk inhibitor protein, p27