4,348 research outputs found
Ranking News-Quality Multimedia
News editors need to find the photos that best illustrate a news piece and
fulfill news-media quality standards, while being pressed to also find the most
recent photos of live events. Recently, it became common to use social-media
content in the context of news media for its unique value in terms of immediacy
and quality. Consequently, the amount of images to be considered and filtered
through is now too much to be handled by a person. To aid the news editor in
this process, we propose a framework designed to deliver high-quality,
news-press type photos to the user. The framework, composed of two parts, is
based on a ranking algorithm tuned to rank professional media highly and a
visual SPAM detection module designed to filter-out low-quality media. The core
ranking algorithm is leveraged by aesthetic, social and deep-learning semantic
features. Evaluation showed that the proposed framework is effective at finding
high-quality photos (true-positive rate) achieving a retrieval MAP of 64.5% and
a classification precision of 70%.Comment: To appear in ICMR'1
The Skip Quadtree: A Simple Dynamic Data Structure for Multidimensional Data
We present a new multi-dimensional data structure, which we call the skip
quadtree (for point data in R^2) or the skip octree (for point data in R^d,
with constant d>2). Our data structure combines the best features of two
well-known data structures, in that it has the well-defined "box"-shaped
regions of region quadtrees and the logarithmic-height search and update
hierarchical structure of skip lists. Indeed, the bottom level of our structure
is exactly a region quadtree (or octree for higher dimensional data). We
describe efficient algorithms for inserting and deleting points in a skip
quadtree, as well as fast methods for performing point location and approximate
range queries.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures. A preliminary version of this paper appeared in
the 21st ACM Symp. Comp. Geom., Pisa, 2005, pp. 296-30
Folic Acid Supplementation Improves Vascular Function in Professional Dancers With Endothelial Dysfunction
Objective To determine if folic acid supplementation improves vascular function (brachial artery flow-mediated dilation [FMD]) in professional dancers with known endothelial dysfunction. Design Prospective cross-sectional study. Setting Academic institution in the Midwestern United States. Subjects Twenty-two professional ballet dancers volunteered for this study. Main Outcome Measures
Subjects completed a 3-day food record to determine caloric and micronutrient intake. Menstrual status was determined by interview and questionnaire. Endothelial function was determined as flow-induced vasodilation measured by high-frequency ultrasound of the brachial artery. A change in brachial diameter of Results Sixty-four percent of dancers (n = 14) had abnormal brachial artery FMD (P\u3c .0001). Conclusions This study reveals that vascular endothelial function improves in dancers after supplementation with folic acid (10 mg/day) for at least 4 weeks. This finding may have clinically important implications for future cardiovascular disease risk prevention
Environmental Federalism in the European Union and the United States
The United States (US) and the European Union (EU) are federal systems in which the responsibility for environmental policy-making is divided or shared between the central government and the (member) states. The attribution of decision-making power has important policy implications. This chapter compares the role of central and local authorities in the US and the EU in formulating environmental regulations in three areas: automotive emissions for health related (criteria) pollutants, packaging waste, and global climate change. Automotive emissions are relatively centralised in both political systems. In the cases of packaging waste and global climate change, regulatory policy-making is shared in the EU, but is primarily the responsibility of local governments in the US. Thus, in some important areas, regulatory policy-making is more centralised in the EU. The most important role local governments play in the regulatory process is to help diffuse stringent local standards through more centralised regulations, a dynamic which has become recently become more important in the EU than in the US.
Association Between the Female Athlete Triad and Endothelial Dysfunction in Dancers
Objective: To determine the prevalence of the 3 components of the female athlete triad [disordered eating, menstrual dysfunction, low bone mineral density (BMD)] and their relationships with brachial artery flow-mediated dilation in professional dancers.
Design: Prospective study.
Setting: Academic institution in the Midwest.
Participants: Twenty-two professional ballet dancers volunteered for this study.
Interventions: The prevalence of the female athlete triad and its relationship to endothelial dysfunction.
Main Outcome Measures: Subjects completed questionnaires to assess disordered eating and menstrual status/history. They also completed a 3-day food record and wore an accelerometer for 3 days to determine energy availability. Serum baseline thyrotropin, prolactin, and hormonal concentrations were obtained. Bone mineral density and body composition were measured with a GE Lunar Prodigy dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. Endothelial function was determined as flow-mediated vasodilation measured by high-frequency ultrasound in the brachial artery. An increase in brachial diameter
Results: Seventeen dancers (77%) had evidence of low/negative energy availability. Thirty-two percent had disordered eating (EDE-Q score). Thirty-six percent had menstrual dysfunction and 14% were currently using hormone contraception. Twenty-three percent had evidence of low bone density (Z-score \u3c -1.0). Sixty-four percent had abnormal brachial artery flow-mediated dilation (
Conclusions: Endothelial dysfunction was correlated with reduced BMD, menstrual dysfunction, and low serum estrogen. These findings may have profound implications for cardiovascular and bone health in professional women dancers
Kirigami Actuators
Thin elastic sheets bend easily and, if they are patterned with cuts, can
deform in sophisticated ways. Here we show that carefully tuning the location
and arrangement of cuts within thin sheets enables the design of mechanical
actuators that scale down to atomically-thin 2D materials. We first show that
by understanding the mechanics of a single, non-propagating crack in a sheet we
can generate four fundamental forms of linear actuation: roll, pitch, yaw, and
lift. Our analytical model shows that these deformations are only weakly
dependent on thickness, which we confirm with experiments at centimeter scale
objects and molecular dynamics simulations of graphene and MoS nanoscale
sheets. We show how the interactions between non-propagating cracks can enable
either lift or rotation, and we use a combination of experiments, theory,
continuum computational analysis, and molecular dynamics simulations to provide
mechanistic insights into the geometric and topological design of kirigami
actuators.Comment: Soft Matter, 201
Cross-Product Extensions of the Gene Ontology
The Gene Ontology is being normalized and extended to include computable logical definitions. These definitions are partitioned into mutually exclusive cross-product sets, many of which reference other OBO Foundry ontologies. The results can be used to reason over the ontology, and to make cross-ontology queries
Two Weeks of Ischemic Conditioning Improves Walking Speed and Reduces Neuromuscular Fatigability in Chronic Stroke Survivors
This pilot study examined whether ischemic conditioning (IC), a noninvasive, cost-effective, and easy-to-administer intervention, could improve gait speed and paretic leg muscle function in stroke survivors. We hypothesized that 2 wk of IC training would increase self-selected walking speed, increase paretic muscle strength, and reduce neuromuscular fatigability in chronic stroke survivors. Twenty-two chronic stroke survivors received either IC or IC Sham on their paretic leg every other day for 2 wk (7 total sessions). IC involved 5-min bouts of ischemia, repeated five times, using a cuff inflated to 225 mmHg on the paretic thigh. For IC Sham, the cuff inflation pressure was 10 mmHg. Self-selected walking speed was assessed using the 10-m walk test, and paretic leg knee extensor strength and fatigability were assessed using a Biodex dynamometer. Self-selected walking speed increased in the IC group (0.86â±â0.21 m/s pretest vs. 1.04â±â0.22 m/s posttest, meansâ±âSD; P\u3c 0.001) but not in the IC Sham group (0.92â±â0.47 m/s pretest vs. 0.96â±â0.46 m/s posttest; P= 0.25). Paretic leg maximum voluntary contractions were unchanged in both groups (103â±â57 N·m pre-IC vs. 109â±â65 N·m post-IC; 103â±â59 N·m pre-IC Sham vs. 108â±â67 N·m post-IC Sham; P = 0.81); however, participants in the IC group maintained a submaximal isometric contraction longer than participants in the IC Sham group (278â±â163 s pre-IC vs. 496â±â313 s post-IC, P = 0.004; 397â±â203 s pre-IC Sham vs. 355â±â195 s post-IC Sham; P = 0.46). The results from this pilot study thus indicate that IC training has the potential to improve walking speed and paretic muscle fatigue resistance poststroke
Efficiency of a Brownian information machine
A Brownian information machine extracts work from a heat bath through a
feedback process that exploits the information acquired in a measurement. For
the paradigmatic case of a particle trapped in a harmonic potential, we
determine how power and efficiency for two variants of such a machine operating
cyclically depend on the cycle time and the precision of the positional
measurements. Controlling only the center of the trap leads to a machine that
has zero efficiency at maximum power whereas additional optimal control of the
stiffness of the trap leads to an efficiency bounded between 1/2, which holds
for maximum power, and 1 reached even for finite cycle time in the limit of
perfect measurements.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figure
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