The Secret to Popular Chinese Web Novels: A Corpus-Driven Study

What is the secret to writing popular novels? The issue is an intriguing one among researchers from various fields. The goal of this study is to identify the linguistic features of several popular web novels as well as how the textual features found within and the overall tone interact with the genre and themes of each novel. Apart from writing style, non-textual information may also reveal details behind the success of web novels. Since web fiction has become a major industry with top writers making millions of dollars and their stories adapted into published books, determining essential elements of "publishable" novels is of importance. The present study further examines how non-textual information, namely, the number of hits, shares, favorites, and comments, may contribute to several features of the most popular published and unpublished web novels. Findings reveal that keywords, function words, and lexical diversity of a novel are highly related to its genres and writing style while dialogue proportion shows the narration voice of the story. In addition, relatively shorter sentences are found in these novels. The data also reveal that the number of favorites and comments serve as significant predictors for the number of shares and hits of unpublished web novels, respectively; however, the number of hits and shares of published web novels is more unpredictable

Systemic Associations with Residual Subretinal Fluid after Ranibizumab in Diabetic Macular Edema

Purpose. To investigate the impact of systemic diseases on the occurrence of subretinal fluid (SRF) in diabetic macular edema (DME) and prognostic factors for residual SRF following three consecutive monthly intravitreal ranibizumab. Methods. Ninety-seven eyes from 68 patients with DME who completed 3 consecutive monthly injections of ranibizumab were enrolled. Systemic parameters mainly included chronic kidney disease (CKD), hypertension, HbA1c, and insulin dependence. Renal parameters for CKD were serum creatinine, estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), and serum albumin. Ocular factors were baseline central macular thickness (CMT), severity of diabetic retinopathy (DR), and status of panretinal photocoagulation (PRP). Results. Chronic kidney disease had significant correlation with baseline SRF (R=0.397, p<0.001 after partial correlation with adjustment for age and DR severity). As for CKD, lower serum albumin, but not eGFR or serum creatinine, was associated with baseline presence of SRF (p=0.026, p=0.08 and p=0.53, resp., after adjustment for age and DR severity). Overall, lower eGFR and lower HbA1c values, contrary to popular belief, predicted the presence of residual SRF following intravitreal injections (p=0.016 and p<0.001, resp.). Conclusions. Tight sugar control and poorer baseline kidney function may slow the resorption of SRF after anti-VEGF injections in patients with DME in the short term

NERVE CONDUCTION VELOCITY INVESTIGATION IN ATHLETES WITH TRAINED LOWER EXTRAMITY FOR WELL·CONTROLLlNG MOVEMENT

Reaction, coordination and speed ability are essential for success in a variety of sports. Nerve conduction velocity (NCV) is related to all of these abilities. Previous studies had investigated power and endurance type athletes, but there is less research in athletes who are skilled in coordinated lower extremity movements requiring more neural adaptation for nerve conduction velocity after specific exercise training. The purpose of this study is to investigate nerve conduction velocity of soccer, sanshou players and untrained subjects. Results show that NCV was significantly different among the 3 groups (p < .05) for the femoral and tibal nerves. For both femoral and tibial nerve.§, results showed that the soccer players had significantly faster NCV than the other groups (p < .05). According to the results, faster NCV adaptation from long term training in soccer players may be relate to their movement requirement of changing their movement direction quickly and skillfully

Assessing the Stroke-Specific Quality of Life for Outcome Measurement in Stroke Rehabilitation: Minimal Detectable Change and Clinically Important Difference

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>This study was conducted to establish the minimal detectable change (MDC) and clinically important differences (CIDs) of the physical category of the Stroke-Specific Quality of Life Scale in patients with stroke.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>MDC and CIDs scores were calculated from the data of 74 participants enrolled in randomized controlled trials investigating the effects of two rehabilitation programs in patients with stroke. These participants received treatments for 3 weeks and underwent clinical assessment before and after treatment. To obtain test-retest reliability for calculating MDC, another 25 patients with chronic stroke were recruited. The MDC was calculated from the standard error of measurement (SEM) to indicate a real change with 95% confidence for individual patients (MDC₉₅). Distribution-based and anchor-based methods were adopted to triangulate the ranges of minimal CIDs. The percentage of scale width was calculated by dividing the MDC and CIDs by the total score range of each physical category. The percentage of patients exceeding MDC₉₅and minimal CIDs was also reported.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The MDC₉₅of the mobility, self-care, and upper extremity (UE) function subscales were 5.9, 4.0, and 5.3 respectively. The minimal CID ranges for these 3 subscales were 1.5 to 2.4, 1.2 to 1.9, and 1.2 to 1.8. The percentage of patients exceeding MDC₉₅and minimal CIDs of the mobility, self-care, and UE function subscales were 9.5% to 28.4%, 6.8% to 28.4%, and 12.2% to 33.8%, respectively.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The change score of an individual patient has to reach 5.9, 4.0, and 5.3 on the 3 subscales to indicate a true change. The mean change scores of a group of patients with stroke on these subscales should reach the lower bound of CID ranges of 1.5 (6.3% scale width), 1.2 (6.0% scale width), and 1.2 (6.0% scale width) to be regarded as clinically important change. This information may facilitate interpretations of patient-reported outcomes after stroke rehabilitation. Future research is warranted to validate these findings.</p

POOR FORCE CONTROL PERFORMANCE AND UNVARIED EMG PATTERN AFTER AGONIST MUSCLE FATIGUE IN HUMANS

Ballistic and accurately control of a targeted fast contraction relies on phasic activations of the agonist and antagonist muscles. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of tibialis anterior (TA) fatigue on the systematic bias and the consistence of the net dorsiflexion torque generation and the controlling pattern of the agonist-antagonist muscles. Ten subjects were tested twice with a week apart. Fast and slow dorsiflexion at 40%-MVG were measured before and after fatigue of the TA by voluntary isometric dorsiflexions. The EMG of the TA and soleus (Sol) were recorded. The results revealed that more post-fatigue increment of the systematic error was in the fast dorsiflexions, random error increment were similar in both speeds of isometric dorsiflexions, the cocontraction ratio increased after fatigue only in the slow dorsiflexions. Our results suggested that precision of the fast targeted isometric contractions was reduced after fatigue because of unvaried agonist-antagonist control strategy

A Flexible-Frame-Rate Vision-Aided Inertial Object Tracking System for Mobile Devices

Real-time object pose estimation and tracking is challenging but essential for emerging augmented reality (AR) applications. In general, state-of-the-art methods address this problem using deep neural networks which indeed yield satisfactory results. Nevertheless, the high computational cost of these methods makes them unsuitable for mobile devices where real-world applications usually take place. In addition, head-mounted displays such as AR glasses require at least 90~FPS to avoid motion sickness, which further complicates the problem. We propose a flexible-frame-rate object pose estimation and tracking system for mobile devices. It is a monocular visual-inertial-based system with a client-server architecture. Inertial measurement unit (IMU) pose propagation is performed on the client side for high speed tracking, and RGB image-based 3D pose estimation is performed on the server side to obtain accurate poses, after which the pose is sent to the client side for visual-inertial fusion, where we propose a bias self-correction mechanism to reduce drift. We also propose a pose inspection algorithm to detect tracking failures and incorrect pose estimation. Connected by high-speed networking, our system supports flexible frame rates up to 120 FPS and guarantees high precision and real-time tracking on low-end devices. Both simulations and real world experiments show that our method achieves accurate and robust object tracking

A rare complication in a child undergoing chemotherapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia: Superior sagittal sinus thrombosis

AbstractWe report the case of a 4-year-old boy with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in high-risk group who suffered from generalized tonic-colonic seizure evolving into status epilepticus, and subsequent left hemiparesis during his first reinduction chemotherapy, consisting of dexamethasone, vincristine, l-asparaginase, and epirubicin. Superior sagittal sinus and cerebral venous thrombosis, predominantly in right side, were proved by brain magnetic resonance imaging. After aggressive treatment with low-molecular weight heparin (LMWH), left hemiparesis improved in 1 week. And he was fully ambulatory 3 weeks later. The second cycle of reinduction chemotherapy was conducted smoothly with the concomitant use of LMWH. This case illustrates the strong correlation of the rare thrombotic complication, superior sagittal sinus thrombosis, and hypercoagulable status secondary to combination use of l-asparaginase and corticosteroid. Early and vigilant recognition of superior sagittal sinus thrombosis and prompt anticoagulation with LMWH may prevent further neurological damage

GeneAlign: a coding exon prediction tool based on phylogenetical comparisons

GeneAlign is a coding exon prediction tool for predicting protein coding genes by measuring the homologies between a sequence of a genome and related sequences, which have been annotated, of other genomes. Identifying protein coding genes is one of most important tasks in newly sequenced genomes. With increasing numbers of gene annotations verified by experiments, it is feasible to identify genes in the newly sequenced genomes by comparing to annotated genes of phylogenetically close organisms. GeneAlign applies CORAL, a heuristic linear time alignment tool, to determine if regions flanked by the candidate signals (initiation codon-GT, AG-GT and AG-STOP codon) are similar to annotated coding exons. Employing the conservation of gene structures and sequence homologies between protein coding regions increases the prediction accuracy. GeneAlign was tested on Projector dataset of 491 human–mouse homologous sequence pairs. At the gene level, both the average sensitivity and the average specificity of GeneAlign are 81%, and they are larger than 96% at the exon level. The rates of missing exons and wrong exons are smaller than 1%. GeneAlign is a free tool available at