4,374 research outputs found
Acupuncture for overweight or obese people (Protocol)
Overweight and obesity are defined as abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that presents a risk to health (WHO 2010). The fundamental cause of obesity and overweight is an energy imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended. Global increases in overweight and obesity are attributable to a number of factors including: a global shift in diet towards increased intake of energy-dense foods that are high in fat and sugars and a trend towards decreased physical activity due to the increasingly sedentary nature of many forms of work, changing modes of transportation, and increasing urbanization. The WHO recommends using the body mass index (BMI), which is defined as the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters (kg/m2), to assess the level of overweight and obesity. At present, the WHO defines overweight as a BMI equal to or more than 25, and obesity as a BMI equal to or more than 30. The range of 18.50 to 24.99 is considered as normal. For Asia-Pacific region, the WHO recommend different ranges (WHO 2000). BMI cut-points provide a benchmark for individual assessment, but must be regarded as a rough guide for adults (WHO 2006). The BMI criteria used for children and teens are different from those used for adults
HYPRO: A Hybridly Normalized Probabilistic Model for Long-Horizon Prediction of Event Sequences
In this paper, we tackle the important yet under-investigated problem of
making long-horizon prediction of event sequences. Existing state-of-the-art
models do not perform well at this task due to their autoregressive structure.
We propose HYPRO, a hybridly normalized probabilistic model that naturally fits
this task: its first part is an autoregressive base model that learns to
propose predictions; its second part is an energy function that learns to
reweight the proposals such that more realistic predictions end up with higher
probabilities. We also propose efficient training and inference algorithms for
this model. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that our
proposed HYPRO model can significantly outperform previous models at making
long-horizon predictions of future events. We also conduct a range of ablation
studies to investigate the effectiveness of each component of our proposed
methods.Comment: NeurIPS 2022 camera-read
Language Models Can Improve Event Prediction by Few-Shot Abductive Reasoning
Large language models have shown astonishing performance on a wide range of
reasoning tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether they could reason about
real-world events and help improve the prediction performance of event sequence
models. We design LAMP, a framework that integrates a large language model in
event prediction. Particularly, the language model performs abductive reasoning
to assist an event sequence model: the event model proposes predictions on
future events given the past; instructed by a few expert-annotated
demonstrations, the language model learns to suggest possible causes for each
proposal; a search module finds out the previous events that match the causes;
a scoring function learns to examine whether the retrieved events could
actually cause the proposal. Through extensive experiments on several
challenging real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our framework -- thanks to
the reasoning capabilities of large language models -- could significantly
outperform the state-of-the-art event sequence models.Comment: NeurIPS 2023 camera-read
Dejian Mind-Body Intervention Improves the Cognitive Functions of a Child with Autism
There has been increasing empirical evidence for the enhancing effects of Dejian Mind-Body Intervention (DMBI), a traditional Chinese Shaolin healing approach, on human frontal brain activity/functions, including patients with autism who are well documented to have frontal lobe problems. This study aims to compare the effects of DMBI with a conventional behavioural/cognitive intervention (CI) on enhancing the executive functions and memory of a nine-year-old boy with low-functioning autism (KY) and to explore possible underlying neural mechanism using EEG theta cordance. At post-one-month DMBI, KY's inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, and memory functioning have significantly improved from “severely-to-moderately impaired” to “within-normal” range. This improvement was not observed from previous 12-month CI. Furthermore, KY showed increased cordance gradually extending from the anterior to the posterior brain region, suggesting possible neural mechanism underlying his cognitive improvement. These findings have implicated potential applicability of DMBI as a rehabilitation program for patients with severe frontal lobe and/or memory disorders
The Hamiltonian boundary term and quasi-local energy flux
The Hamiltonian for a gravitating region includes a boundary term which
determines not only the quasi-local values but also, via the boundary variation
principle, the boundary conditions. Using our covariant Hamiltonian formalism,
we found four particular quasi-local energy-momentum boundary term expressions;
each corresponds to a physically distinct and geometrically clear boundary
condition. Here, from a consideration of the asymptotics, we show how a
fundamental Hamiltonian identity naturally leads to the associated quasi-local
energy flux expressions. For electromagnetism one of the four is distinguished:
the only one which is gauge invariant; it gives the familiar energy density and
Poynting flux. For Einstein's general relativity two different boundary
condition choices correspond to quasi-local expressions which asymptotically
give the ADM energy, the Trautman-Bondi energy and, moreover, an associated
energy flux (both outgoing and incoming). Again there is a distinguished
expression: the one which is covariant.Comment: 12 pages, no figures, revtex
Association of LEP G2548A and LEPR Q223R Polymorphisms with Cancer Susceptibility: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis
__Background:__ Numerous epidemiological studies have examined associations of genetic variations in LEP (G2548A, -2548 nucleotide upstream of the ATG start site) and LEPR (Q223R, nonsynonymous SNP in exon 6) with cancer susceptibility; however, the findings are inconsistent. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis to comprehensively evaluate such associations.
__Methods:__ We searched published literature from MEDLINE, EMBASE, Web of Science and CBM for eligible publications. We also assessed genotype-based mRNA expression data from HapMap for rs7799039 (G2548A) and rs1137101 (Q223R) in normal cell lines derived from 270 subjects with different ethnicities.
__Results:__ The final analysis included 16 published studies of 6569 cases and 8405 controls for the LEP G2548A and 19 studies of 7504 cases and 9581 controls for the LEPR Q223R. Overall, LEP G2548A was statistically significantly associated with an increased risk of overall cancer (AA vs. GG: OR=1.27, 95% CI=1.05-1.54; recessive model: OR=1.19, 9
Janus monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides.
Structural symmetry-breaking plays a crucial role in determining the electronic band structures of two-dimensional materials. Tremendous efforts have been devoted to breaking the in-plane symmetry of graphene with electric fields on AB-stacked bilayers or stacked van der Waals heterostructures. In contrast, transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers are semiconductors with intrinsic in-plane asymmetry, leading to direct electronic bandgaps, distinctive optical properties and great potential in optoelectronics. Apart from their in-plane inversion asymmetry, an additional degree of freedom allowing spin manipulation can be induced by breaking the out-of-plane mirror symmetry with external electric fields or, as theoretically proposed, with an asymmetric out-of-plane structural configuration. Here, we report a synthetic strategy to grow Janus monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides breaking the out-of-plane structural symmetry. In particular, based on a MoS2 monolayer, we fully replace the top-layer S with Se atoms. We confirm the Janus structure of MoSSe directly by means of scanning transmission electron microscopy and energy-dependent X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and prove the existence of vertical dipoles by second harmonic generation and piezoresponse force microscopy measurements
Criteria for the use of omics-based predictors in clinical trials.
The US National Cancer Institute (NCI), in collaboration with scientists representing multiple areas of expertise relevant to 'omics'-based test development, has developed a checklist of criteria that can be used to determine the readiness of omics-based tests for guiding patient care in clinical trials. The checklist criteria cover issues relating to specimens, assays, mathematical modelling, clinical trial design, and ethical, legal and regulatory aspects. Funding bodies and journals are encouraged to consider the checklist, which they may find useful for assessing study quality and evidence strength. The checklist will be used to evaluate proposals for NCI-sponsored clinical trials in which omics tests will be used to guide therapy
Drug hypersensitivity caused by alteration of the MHC-presented self-peptide repertoire
Idiosyncratic adverse drug reactions are unpredictable, dose independent and
potentially life threatening; this makes them a major factor contributing to
the cost and uncertainty of drug development. Clinical data suggest that many
such reactions involve immune mechanisms, and genetic association studies have
identified strong linkage between drug hypersensitivity reactions to several
drugs and specific HLA alleles. One of the strongest such genetic associations
found has been for the antiviral drug abacavir, which causes severe adverse
reactions exclusively in patients expressing the HLA molecular variant B*57:01.
Abacavir adverse reactions were recently shown to be driven by drug-specific
activation of cytokine-producing, cytotoxic CD8+ T cells that required
HLA-B*57:01 molecules for their function. However, the mechanism by which
abacavir induces this pathologic T cell response remains unclear. Here we show
that abacavir can bind within the F-pocket of the peptide-binding groove of
HLA-B*57:01 thereby altering its specificity. This supports a novel explanation
for HLA-linked idiosyncratic adverse drug reactions; namely that drugs can
alter the repertoire of self-peptides presented to T cells thus causing the
equivalent of an alloreactive T cell response. Indeed, we identified specific
self-peptides that are presented only in the presence of abacavir, and that
were recognized by T cells of hypersensitive patients. The assays we have
established can be applied to test additional compounds with suspected HLA
linked hypersensitivities in vitro. Where successful, these assays could speed
up the discovery and mechanistic understanding of HLA linked hypersensitivities
as well as guide the development of safer drugs
Note on two phase phenomena in financial markets
The two phase behavior in financial markets actually means the bifurcation
phenomenon, which represents the change of the conditional probability from an
unimodal to a bimodal distribution. In this paper, the bifurcation phenomenon
in Hang-Seng index is carefully investigated. It is observed that the
bifurcation phenomenon in financial index is not universal, but specific under
certain conditions. The phenomenon just emerges when the power-law exponent of
absolute increment distribution is between 1 and 2 with appropriate period.
Simulations on a randomly generated time series suggest the bifurcation
phenomenon itself is subject to the statistics of absolute increment, thus it
may not be able to reflect the essential financial behaviors. However, even
under the same distribution of absolute increment, the range where bifurcation
phenomenon occurs is far different from real market to artificial data, which
may reflect certain market information.Comment: 8 pages and 5 figure
- …