How to Help Children Develop Emotional Resilience during Coronavirus

Help your child build resilience in the face of adversities with tips from experts. The great uncertainty we are facing during COVID-19 has left many of us anxious, stressed, defensive, and short-sighted. Children are more vulnerable than adults to the emotional impact of traumatic events that disrupt their normal lives

Prolonged transition time between colostrum and mature milk in a bear, the giant panda, Ailuropoda melanoleuca

Bears produce the most altricial neonates of any placental mammal. We hypothesized that the transition from colostrum to mature milk in bears reflects a temporal and biochemical adaptation for altricial development and immune protection. Comparison of bear milks with milks of other eutherians yielded distinctive protein profiles. Proteomic and metabolomic analysis of serial milk samples collected from six giant pandas showed a prolonged transition from colostrum to main-phase lactation over approximately 30 days. Particularly striking are the persistence or sequential appearance of adaptive and innate immune factors. The endurance of immunoglobulin G suggests an unusual duration of trans-intestinal absorption of maternal antibodies, and is potentially relevant to the underdeveloped lymphoid system of giant panda neonates. Levels of certain milk oligosaccharides known to exert anti-microbial activities and/or that are conducive to the development of neonatal gut microbiomes underwent an almost complete changeover around days 20–30 postpartum, coincident with the maturation of the protein profile. A potential metabolic marker of starvation was detected, the prominence of which may reflect the natural postpartum period of anorexia in giant panda mothers. Early lactation in giant pandas, and possibly in other ursids, appears to be adapted for the unique requirements of unusually altricial eutherian neonates

Concerts in Care Ontario: Evaluation of Performances, May-June 2021

Background: Concerts in Care Ontario (CiCO) is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing older adults with access to musical performances. During COVID-19, CiCO has transitioned to an online delivery of their programming, using Zoom to reach older adults living independently and in congregate care settings. This project explores the potential benefits of virtual CiCO performances for older adults and their care partners, with a focus on specific pandemic-related concerns for the older adult population, including mood and social connection. Method: Data were collected in a variety of ways: 1) through observation of CiCO performances (n = 13), 2) a questionnaire (n = 59 senior participants and n = 3 staff), and 3) interviews and standardized evaluation forms from staff (n = 6). Results: Satisfaction with the performances was very high, with 100% of participants reporting benefits for their well-being. Participants indicated feeling more relaxed and connected, and that they appreciated the educational/learning aspect of the performance structure. Participants were observed to react in positive ways to the performances, including outward displays of appreciation for and curiosity with the music, performers, and instruments. Staff indicated that the performances were extremely positive for the older adults in their care and had a secondary benefit for the well-being of staff within the congregate care settings. Conclusions: Virtual delivery of Concerts in Care Ontario programming was very successful, with both the older adults and the staff who attended (via Zoom) the concerts responding positively to the experience. Future exploration of a hybrid model of performance delivery post the COVID-19 pandemic may help even more Ontario older adults access the healing power of music

Effect of Printing Orientation on Strength of 3D Printed ABS Plastics

The mechanical strengths of ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) components fabricated by fused deposition modeling (FDM) technique have been studied, with the focus on the effect of printing orientations on the strength. Using the properties derived from stress-strain curves of the samples, the 0-degree printed sample has the strongest mechanical properties, which is likely due to preferred orientations in individual slice

Liquid level sensor utilising a long period fiber grating

We propose here a liquid level sensor using a long period fiber grating (LPFG) in which direct liquid level measurement is carried out by utilising an LPFG, 100mm in length and a periodicity of 1mm. The LPFG was exposed to liquids with varying levels and the wavelength shift of a selected loss band of the transmission spectra was monitored using a broadband light source and an optical spectrum analyzer. The mechanism of this LPFG sensor is based on the fact that the effective Refractive Index (RI) of a cladding mode is directly dependant on the RI of the surrounding medium, be it air, or in this case water and petrol. As the surrounding RI changes, so does the phase matching condition of the LPFG. The result for the level change of the liquid with a specific RI is both a shift in wavelength and a change in the attenuation level of the selected loss band. For the selected loss band, continuous wavelength shifts of 9.5 nm and 25 nm for 100 mm of water and petrol level change have been observed respectively, with sub-millimetre accuracy

Liquid level sensing by use of digital formatted optical spectrum spreading technique

We propose a novel technique for optical liquid level sensing. The technique takes advantage of an optical spectrum spreading technique and directly measures liquid level with a digital format. The performance of the sensor does not suffer from changes of environmental variables and system variables. Due to its distinct measurement principle both high resolution and a large measurement range can be achieved simultaneously

Tensile, Creep, and Fatigue Behaviors of 3D-Printed Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene

Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) is a widely used thermoplastics in 3D printing. However, there is a lack of thorough investigation of the mechanical properties of 3D-printed ABS components, including orientation-dependent tensile strength and creep fatigue properties. In this work, a systematic characterization is conducted on the mechanical properties of 3D-printed ABS components. Specifically, the effect of printing orientation on the tensile and creep properties is investigated. The results show that, in tensile tests, the 0° printing orientation has the highest Young’s modulus of 1.81 GPa, and ultimate strength of 224 MPa. In the creep test, the 90° printing orientation has the lowest k value of 0.2 in the plastics creep model, suggesting 90° is the most creep resistant direction. In the fatigue test, the average cycle number under load of 30 N is 3796 cycles. The average cycle number decreases to 128 cycles when the load is 60 N. Using the Paris law, with an estimated crack size of 0.75 mm, and stress intensity factor is varied from 352 to 70

DIME-FM: DIstilling Multimodal and Efficient Foundation Models

Large Vision-Language Foundation Models (VLFM), such as CLIP, ALIGN and Florence, are trained on large-scale datasets of image-caption pairs and achieve superior transferability and robustness on downstream tasks, but they are difficult to use in many practical applications due to their large size, high latency and fixed architectures. Unfortunately, recent work shows training a small custom VLFM for resource-limited applications is currently very difficult using public and smaller-scale data. In this paper, we introduce a new distillation mechanism (DIME-FM) that allows us to transfer the knowledge contained in large VLFMs to smaller, customized foundation models using a relatively small amount of inexpensive, unpaired images and sentences. We transfer the knowledge from the pre-trained CLIP-ViTL/14 model to a ViT-B/32 model, with only 40M public images and 28.4M unpaired public sentences. The resulting model "Distill-ViT-B/32" rivals the CLIP-ViT-B/32 model pre-trained on its private WiT dataset (400M image-text pairs): Distill-ViT-B/32 achieves similar results in terms of zero-shot and linear-probing performance on both ImageNet and the ELEVATER (20 image classification tasks) benchmarks. It also displays comparable robustness when evaluated on five datasets with natural distribution shifts from ImageNet