Childhood intelligence predicts premature mortality : Results from a 40-year population-based longitudinal study

Acknowledgements This study was supported by a grant from the Luxembourg Fonds National de la Recherche (VIVRE FNR/06/09/18) and a PhD scholarship awarded to the first author by the Fonds National de la Recherche.Peer reviewedPostprin

Optimal Hardy Inequality for Fractional Laplacians on the Integers

We study the fractional Hardy inequality on the integers. We prove the optimality of the Hardy weight and hence affirmatively answer the question of sharpness of the constant

Consolidation methods of Romanian historical building with composite materials

Timisoara is a growing city in the western part of Romania, in a seismic area, with a lot of masonry buildings with historical and cultural value, with interesting structural elements such as vaults, arches, slabs, walls, that were affected by earthquakes, subsidence of foundations, negative human actions or lack of interventions. Masonry historical structures in Banat seismic area present particular failure mechanisms, so there is a need for new, modern, fast, easy-to-apply and reversible consolidation methods. With this type of methods is possible to assure the local and global resistance, ductility, stability and rigidity for historical buildings. This article shows the consolidation methods that were applied on the buildings Sf. Gheorghe 3 and 4, in the historical centre of Timisoara, on masonry structures with historical value. The solutions that were applied are using new, innovative fibre-reinforced composite materials, in order to repair the existing damages and prevent further ones. The consolidation solutions with these new composite materials reduce the buildings vulnerability and present the advantage of being fast and easy to be executed

Enhanced jump performance when providing augmented feedback compared to an external or internal focus of attention

Factors such as an external focus of attention (EF) and augmented feedback (AF) have been shown to improve performance. However, the efficacy of providing AF to enhance motor performance has never been compared with the effects of an EF or an internal focus of attention (IF). Therefore, the aim of the present study was to identify which of the three conditions (AF, EF or IF) leads to the highest performance in a countermovement jump (CMJ). Nineteen volunteers performed 12 series of 8 maximum CMJs. Changes in jump height between conditions and within the series were analysed. Jump heights differed between conditions (P P < 0.001) within-series effects of higher jump heights at the end of the series in AF (+1.60%) and lower jump heights at the end of the series in EF (−1.79%) and IF (−1.68%) were observed. Muscle activity did not differ between conditions. The differences between conditions and within the series provide evidence that AF leads to higher performance and better progression within one series than EF and IF. Consequently, AF seems to outperform EF and IF when maximising jump height

Bridging the Gap Between Multi-Step and One-Shot Trajectory Prediction via Self-Supervision

Accurate vehicle trajectory prediction is an unsolved problem in autonomous driving with various open research questions. State-of-the-art approaches regress trajectories either in a one-shot or step-wise manner. Although one-shot approaches are usually preferred for their simplicity, they relinquish powerful self-supervision schemes that can be constructed by chaining multiple time-steps. We address this issue by proposing a middle-ground where multiple trajectory segments are chained together. Our proposed Multi-Branch Self-Supervised Predictor receives additional training on new predictions starting at intermediate future segments. In addition, the model 'imagines' the latent context and 'predicts the past' while combining multi-modal trajectories in a tree-like manner. We deliberately keep aspects such as interaction and environment modeling simplistic and nevertheless achieve competitive results on the INTERACTION dataset. Furthermore, we investigate the sparsely explored uncertainty estimation of deterministic predictors. We find positive correlations between the prediction error and two proposed metrics, which might pave way for determining prediction confidence.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, to be published in 34th IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV

Estimating the Effective Elasticity Properties of a Diamond/β\beta-SiC Composite Thin Film by 3D Reconstruction and Numerical Homogenization

The main aim of the present work is to estimate the effective elastic stiffnesses of a two-phase diamond/$\beta$-SiC composite thin film that is fabricated by chemical vapor deposition. The parameters of linear elasticity are determined by numerical homogenization. The database is sparse since for the 3D volume of interest only two micrographs displaying the phase distributions in perpendicular planes are available; micrographs each of a cross-section and the surface of the thin film. A representative volume element (RVE) is reconstructed by an optimization software and by means of identified material symmetries in 2D of the specimen. The elastic homogenization results indicate that the two-phase diamond/$\beta$-SiC composite exhibits the behavior of transverse isotropy, for which the set of six independent material parameters is identified

Virtual reality for children with special needs

While virtual reality technology is already widely used in business and culture for immersion in new worlds of experience, virtual reality (VR) in the field of special and inclusive education is still not widespread. Students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are often externally determined to various degrees in their lives. To cope with everyday life independently, practicing action skills is necessary. In a real-world physical environment, this is not always easy. Virtual reality offers a possibility to acquire skills without restrictive conditions.Within the project “Virtual Reality for Children with Special Needs” the potentials of virtual reality for students with IDD are explored. This research and development (R&D) project is a collaborative effort of the University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW Winterthur), the University of Teacher Education in Special Needs (HfH Zürich), and Vivala as the Foundation which supports persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities

The occurrence of ansamers in the synthesis of cyclic peptides

α-Amanitin is a bicyclic octapeptide composed of a macrolactam with a tryptathionine cross-link forming a handle. Previously, the occurrence of isomers of amanitin, termed atropisomers has been postulated. Although the total synthesis of α-amanitin has been accomplished this aspect still remains unsolved. We perform the synthesis of amanitin analogs, accompanied by in-depth spectroscopic, crystallographic and molecular dynamics studies. The data unambiguously confirms the synthesis of two amatoxin-type isomers, for which we propose the term ansamers. The natural structure of the P-ansamer can be ansa-selectively synthesized using an optimized synthetic strategy. We believe that the here described terminology does also have implications for many other peptide structures, e.g. norbornapeptides, lasso peptides, tryptorubins and others, and helps to unambiguously describe conformational isomerism of cyclic peptides

Entire large solutions for semilinear elliptic equations

We analyze the semilinear elliptic equation $\Delta u=\rho(x) f(u)$, $u>0$ in ${\mathbf R}^D$ $(D\ge3)$, with a particular emphasis put on the qualitative study of entire large solutions, that is, solutions $u$ such that $\lim_{|x|\rightarrow +\infty}u(x)=+\infty$. Assuming that $f$ satisfies the Keller-Osserman growth assumption and that $\rho$ decays at infinity in a suitable sense, we prove the existence of entire large solutions. We then discuss the more delicate questions of asymptotic behavior at infinity, uniqueness and symmetry of solutions.Comment: Journal of Differential Equations 2012, 28 page