Analysis of Biodynamic Responses Associated with Upper Limb Reaching Movements under Whole-Body Vibration: Support for an Active Biodynamic Model.

Vehicle vibration is a well-recognized environmental stressor inducing discomfort, health risks, and performance degradation of the operator on board. More specifically, vibration transmitted by heavy transportation, construction, or military vehicles to the whole body of a seated occupant interferes with manual activities, which in turn may significantly compromise performance. Numerous approaches have attempted to understand the effects of vibration on the seated human for developing biomechanical models or to identify human reaching behaviors for developing human movement models. However, all these studies were limited to biomechanical models of the torso excluding the upper limbs, or to reach models based only on static conditions with no consideration of the interaction between environmental conditions of vibration and biodynamic characteristics of arm movements. The ultimate goal of this work is to provide a framework for an active biodynamic model of operators in vehicles based on empirical analyses of biodynamic responses of seated humans performing reaching movements under simplified whole-body vibration conditions. Hence, the present work investigates vibration transmission through multi-body segments as a function of vibration frequency and direction, identifies vibration-induced changes in reach kinematics of upper arm movements, analyzes the mechanisms of vibration transmission through a multi-body system as a function of posture and movement coordination, and proposes the integration of these empirical results for developing a biodynamic model. Five major results characterize our findings: a) vibration frequency is the dominant factor determining transmission characteristics through upper body segments, b) reach directions in three-dimensional space may be divided into three groups corresponding to transmission propagated through the upper limbs, c) visual compensation contributes to hand stabilization but does not modify significantly propagated transmission, d) elbow flexion contributes to the enhancement of hand stabilization by dissipating vibration energy, and e) biodynamic responses must be considered as three-dimensional tensors including the auto-axial and cross-axial transmissions. Furthermore, movement coordination and joint movement kinematics of reach movements are consistent between static and vibratory environments. The integration of these results may be used to support the structure of an active biodynamic model of the seated human.Ph.D.Mechanical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75796/1/heonjeon_1.pd

Gender inequality among champions and players’ reception of gender disproportion of utility support champions in league of legends

Designing female character in video game has been criticized as being sexually objectified and underrepresented in quantity (number of characters and their appearance rate in the game) and in quality (take only secondary role and inferior ability statistics given). In this paper, we analyze world leading multiple-user online battle arena game league of legends to see if previously criticized gender inequality of champions still stands and conduct a survey of 1,403 players of that game and asks how they feel about serious gender disproportion of utility support champions (all females). The result shows that league of legends still has serious gender disparity in performance parameters and there has been only a small change in 5-year span (2014-2019). The survey result tells us that game players also feel political incorrectness of such gender disproportion, but they accept such gender prototype because they have been taught as such as social role theory explains gender inequality issues

Pheochromocytoma Presenting with Hypertensive Encephalopathy in a 12-Year-Old Boy

Although pheochromocytoma is rare in children, it could result in hypertensive emergency. We describe the case of a 12-year-old boy with pheochromocytoma. His clinical manifestations indicated hypertensive encephalopathy; however, there were no space-occupying lesion in the brain and definitive evidence of secondary cause of hypertension. Knowing that he had extremely high blood pressure, headache, palpitation, and perspiration rendered sympathetic crisis a presumptive diagnosis. Subsequently, pheochromocytoma was diagnosed by computed tomography and catecholamine assay. After stabilizing the blood pressure with antihypertensive medications, such as phenoxybenzamine, laparoscopic adrenalectomy was performed, and he was discharged without residual discomfort. We would like to highlight expeditious diagnosis and proper management of pheochromocytoma with hypertensive encephalopathy

Segmentation of Intensity Inhomogeneous Brain MR Images Using Active Contours

Segmentation of intensity inhomogeneous regions is a well-known problem in image analysis applications. This paper presents a region-based active contour method for image segmentation, which properly works in the context of intensity inhomogeneity problem. The proposed region-based active contour method embeds both region and gradient information unlike traditional methods. It contains mainly two terms, area and length, in which the area term practices a new region-based signed pressure force (SPF) function, which utilizes mean values from a certain neighborhood using the local binary fitted (LBF) energy model. In turn, the length term uses gradient information. The novelty of our method is to locally compute new SPF function, which uses local mean values and is able to detect boundaries of the homogenous regions. Finally, a truncated Gaussian kernel is used to regularize the level set function, which not only regularizes it but also removes the need of computationally expensive reinitialization. The proposed method targets the segmentation problem of intensity inhomogeneous images and reduces the time complexity among locally computed active contour methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method yields better segmentation result as well as less time complexity compared with the state-of-the-art active contour methods

Acronym-Expansion Disambiguation for Intelligent Processing of Enterprise Information

An acronym is an abbreviation of several words in such a way that the abbreviation itself forms a pronounceable word. Acronyms occur frequently throughout various documents, especially those of a technical nature, for example, research papers and patents. While these acronyms can enhance document readability, in a variety of fields, they have a negative effect on business intelligence. To resolve this problem, we propose a method of acronym-expansion disambiguation to collect high-quality enterprise information. In experimental evaluations, we demonstrate its efficiency through the use of objective comparisons