How do individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN) experience the voice dialogue method in the context of experiencing an internal eating disorder voice? A Thematic Analysis

Objective: The internal eating disorder voice (EDV) has been implicated in the development and maintenance of anorexia nervosa (AN). However, limited research has examined interventions for this phenomenon. This study expanded the literature by exploring the acceptability of using such interventions by exploring how women with a diagnosis of AN experienced the voice dialogue method as a way of understanding and managing their EDV. Method: Nine women participated in the study. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews upon the completion of a single voice dialogue intervention. Thematic Analysis (TA) was used to understand how participants experienced the voice dialogue method and its relevance for treating AN. Results: Three main themes were identified: “externalizing and separating from the EDV”, “better understanding of the EDV” and “recovery: hopeful, motivated and afraid”. Conclusions: Participants found voice dialogue to be an acceptable approach for working with their EDV. Preliminary results suggest that voice dialogue might hold promise in the treatment of AN. However, more research is needed to verify these findings and determine the effectiveness of voice dialogue in treating AN. Implications for addressing the EDV using voice focused interventions are explored

Imprints of Schwinger Effect on Primordial Spectra

We study the Schwinger effect during inflation and its imprints on the primordial power spectrum and bispectrum. The produced charged particles by Schwinger effect during inflation can leave a unique angular dependence on the primordial spectra.Comment: 27 pages, 13 figures, JHEP accepted versio

Determinants and effect of accounting comparability: insights from mandatory IFRS adoption In Australia and the EU

This thesis examines the determinants and associations of accounting comparability in the context of the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) as of 2005 in Australia and the European Union (EU). Comparability is an important attribute of financial reporting that is desirable because it enhances the usefulness of financial accounting information. This thesis examines the relative importance of accounting standards, firms’ reporting incentives and institutional features in determining cross-country accounting comparability. As capital market participants are expected to benefit from enhanced comparability, this thesis also investigates the role of cross-country accounting comparability in influencing a firm’s information environment in the capital market. The first empirical study examines the impact of mandatory IFRS adoption on cross-country accounting comparability. Using a sample of matched firm-pairs from Australia and the EU, the results show that mandatory IFRS adoption improves cross-country accounting comparability. This is evidenced by the extent to which economically similar events and transactions are reflected similarly without any discernible impact on economically dissimilar events and transactions. The results also reveal that the comparability benefit of mandatory IFRS adoption is more pronounced for matched firm-pairs with different legal origins. The findings of this empirical study suggest that adopting a uniform set of accounting standards is crucial in achieving comparability. The second empirical study explores the interaction of firms’ reporting incentives, country-level institutional factors and mandatory IFRS adoption on cross-country accounting comparability. The results show that the improvement in cross-country accounting comparability resulting from mandatory IFRS adoption persists even after controlling for the dissimilarity of firms’ reporting incentives and institutional differences between similar firms. This is despite findings demonstrating that cross-country accounting comparability is diminished by greater dissimilarity in reporting incentives and institutional differences between similar firms and after mandatory adoption of IFRS. Nevertheless, the results further show that the comparability improvement following mandatory IFRS adoption for similar firms when some EU countries concurrently made substantive enforcement changes is pronounced only after the dissimilarity of firms’ reporting incentives is considered. The findings suggest that cross-country accounting comparability is partly determined by the alignment of firm-specific and country-level factors even when a common set of accounting standards is in place. The third study examines the impact of accounting comparability on the information content of stock prices. Using stock return synchronicity as a proxy, the results reveal that accounting comparability decreases stock return synchronicity and that this relation is weakened by mandatory IFRS adoption. The findings suggest that the usefulness of accounting comparability in facilitating the incorporation of firm-specific information into stock prices is reduced by a greater amount of marketwide information becoming available via mandatory IFRS adoption. The study finds that this is likely because of increased analyst coverage encouraging the production of marketwide information for firms with greater comparability after adopting IFRS.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Business School, 202

Knowledge, attitude and practice of antenatal exercise among pregnant women in Hospital Universiti Sains Malaysia

Exercise has been demonstrated to be beneficial for the mother and the unborn child, and programs of antenatal exercise for pregnant women have been recommended. There are few references on this subject in the literature. The aim of this study was to investigate the knowledge, attitude and practice of antenatal exercise among pregnant women in Hospital Universiti Sains Malaysia (Hospital USM). A cross-sectional, descriptive study was conducted in 128 pregnant women of 18 to 45 years of age receiving antenatal care at Hospital Universiti Sains Malaysia were surveyed using a structured self-administered questionnaire. The simple random sampling technique was used to select the sample for the study. Statistical analysis was conducted using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize socio-demographic and characteristics of the pregnant women. The Pearson’s chi-Square test was used to evaluate the association between the study variables: socio-demographic data (age, education level, number of pregnancy and income) with the knowledge, attitude, and practice of antenatal execise of pregnant women. A p-value of equal or less than 0.05 was considered significant. There was 56.3% (72) of study population had inadequate knowledge of antenatal exercise and 65.6% (84) participants had adequate attitude. Then, there was 53.9% (69) of participants had adequate practice while the remaining 46.1% (59) participants had inadequate practice. Educational level was found to be associated with the knowledge level of participants, with p-value 0.020. The two main sources of information regarding antenatal exercise are magazines (60.6%) and doctors (58.7%). There was 92.7% (114) participants claimed that antenatal exercise is necessary and important because it makes childbirth easier. Lack of information regarding antenatal exercise was the principal reason given by 29 (56.9%) participants for not exercising during pregnancy. This study reflected that there was a lack of knowledge in most of the pregnant women population. In comparison with the knowledge, attitude of pregnant women was higher regarding antenatal exercise. Besides that, These results suggest that the pregnant women’s knowledge concerning the antenatal exercise during pregnancy was inadequate and their attitude was favorable; there was nearly half of pregnant women not practiced antenatal exercises during pregnancy. Therefore, awareness regarding the benefit of antenatal exercise and related programme on exercise would be useful for pregnant women to practice antenatal exercise

Harmonising with Heaven and Earth: Reciprocal Harmony and Xunzi’s Environmental Ethics

Xunzi’s philosophy provide a rich resource for understanding how ethical relationships between humans and nature can be articulated in terms of harmony. In this paper, I build on his ideas to develop the concept of reciprocal harmony, which requires us to reciprocate those who make our lives liveable. In the context of the environment, I argue that reciprocal harmony generates moral obligations towards nature, in return for the existential debt that humanity owes towards heaven and earth. This can be used as a normative basis for an environmental ethic that enables humanity and nature to flourish together.Submitted/Accepted versio

Progressive Text-to-3D Generation for Automatic 3D Prototyping

Text-to-3D generation is to craft a 3D object according to a natural language description. This can significantly reduce the workload for manually designing 3D models and provide a more natural way of interaction for users. However, this problem remains challenging in recovering the fine-grained details effectively and optimizing a large-size 3D output efficiently. Inspired by the success of progressive learning, we propose a Multi-Scale Triplane Network (MTN) and a new progressive learning strategy. As the name implies, the Multi-Scale Triplane Network consists of four triplanes transitioning from low to high resolution. The low-resolution triplane could serve as an initial shape for the high-resolution ones, easing the optimization difficulty. To further enable the fine-grained details, we also introduce the progressive learning strategy, which explicitly demands the network to shift its focus of attention from simple coarse-grained patterns to difficult fine-grained patterns. Our experiment verifies that the proposed method performs favorably against existing methods. For even the most challenging descriptions, where most existing methods struggle to produce a viable shape, our proposed method consistently delivers. We aspire for our work to pave the way for automatic 3D prototyping via natural language descriptions

The Relationship between the Maintenance Management Problems and the Maintenance Performance of High-Rise Residential Buildings

Building maintenance is the practice to retain the property habitable and functioning as it is designed for. However, the effectiveness of maintenance management appears to be the issue in housing context. Many maintenance management problems still exist up to date. They are likely to influence the service quality and resident satisfaction. Therefore, the objective of this research is to establish the relationship between the maintenance management problems and the maintenance performance. The research adopted quantitative approach to achieve the research aim. The approach comprised of literature review, questionnaire survey using google form that included both close-ended and open-ended questions. Based on the literature review, fourteen (14) maintenance management problems of high-rise residential buildings are identified. From the correlation analysis result, two (2) significance correlations are determined. The maintenance budget overrun is significantly correlated with the ratio of actual maintenance spent to planned maintenance cost (cost variance) of high-rise residential building, and a significant correlation occurs between unavailability of spare parts and ratio of actual to planned maintenance downtime (equipment effectiveness) of high-rise residential building. Besides, the opinions and strategies on solving the maintenance management problems were provided, including educating the residents about the Strata Management Act 2013, selecting qualified maintenance contractor, outsourcing the maintenance services, implementation of preventive maintenance (PM), hiring specialist to perform special maintenance work, providing training for maintenance staffs, formulating the building maintenance regulation, ensuring transparency of financial account, and setting up maintenance policy

Plate number recognition systems based on a contours and character recognition approach

License plate recognition system (LPR) plays an important role in intelligent traffic control system. However, most of the existing LPR are complex and hard to implement. The aim of this project is to improve the LPR techniques in terms of speed and accuracy by applying the Connected Component Analysis (CCA) and K-Nearest Neighbour algorithm (KNN). The LPR is divided into three stages which are image pre-processing, character segmentation, and character recognition. First, the input plate image will undergo some image property functions such as omission of noise to enhance the quality of the image. The CCA is applied to segment the characters by drawing rectangle boxes on each character, based on contours to extract the characters into smaller images. These images are then used as query images in character recognition stage. The images are fed to a pre-defined KNN classifier to determine the features of each image and to identify them. Five experiments were carried out to validate the proposed system. Ten Malaysia single row plate images and two foreign plate images were used as the input images on these tests. The findings show that the proposed system has an 80.0% success rate in segmentation, 92.21% accuracy rate in recognition, the optimal K value is 1, and the input image must be in a single row and comprises of a black background and white characters namely letters and digits. In conclusion, a prototype for plate number recognition has been developed with a high success rate in segmentation and a high accuracy in character recognition. Suggested future studies include a focus on segmenting double row license plates and recognizing similar characters

A retrospective database study on 2-year weight trajectories in first-episode psychosis

IntroductionIt is critical to focus on individual weight profiles in line with efforts to tailor treatment, given the heterogeneous nature of the clinical population. This study aims to identify and describe possible two-year weight trajectories among patients accepted to the Early Psychosis Intervention Programme (EPIP) in Singapore.MethodsDe-identified data was extracted from EPIP’s standing database for patients accepted from 2014 to 2018 with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder. Data collected at fixed time-points (baseline, 1-year, and 2-year) included anthropometric measures (height and weight), and sociodemographic (age, sex, highest education level, and vocational status) and clinical (duration of untreated psychosis, number of inpatient admissions, and scores on the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale and Global Assessment of Functioning) information.ResultsA total of 391 complete data sets were included for main analyses. Those with missing weight data were more likely to be males, older at baseline, have a highest education level of tertiary and above at baseline, and have a longer duration of untreated psychosis. The weight change across two years resulted in the following membership breakdown: 151 (38.6%) in super high risk; 133 (34.0%) in high risk mitigated; 17 (4.3%) in at risk; 34 (8.8%) in delayed risk; and 56 (14.4%) in low risk.DiscussionThe lack of pharmacological, dietary, and physical activity data is a significant limitation in this study; however, the results reinforce the justification for future studies to prospectively capture and examine the influence of these data, with the aim of early detection and weight intervention for high risk groups