Meeting the 24-h Movement Guidelines and Health-Related Outcomes Among Youth With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Seven-Country Observational Study

Background: Meeting daily guidelines for physical activity, screen time, and sleep duration is associated with a host of health indicators for youth. In this cross-sectional observational study, we investigated the associations between adherence to the movement guidelines and health-related outcomes among youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Methods: Parents of youth with ASD (10-17 years) from seven countries and regions were invited to provide online proxy-reports for child\u27s movement behaviors (i.e., physical activity, sleep and screen time), and health-related outcomes (i.e., body mass index [BMI], general health, and quality of life). A series of multiple linear regression analyses were used to examine the associations between meeting movement guidelines and health-related outcomes, adjusted for covariates. Results: The final sample consisted of 1165 youth with ASD. Compared with youth meeting all three guidelines, a higher BMI z-score was observed in those who met no guidelines (B = 0.62, P = 0.04), sedentary time only (B = 0.60, P = 0.047), and physical activity plus sleep only (B = 0.85, P = 0.04). Compared with meeting all three guidelines, meeting no guidelines was associated with poorer general health (B = - 0.46, P = 0.02). Further, compared with youth meeting all three guidelines, a lower quality of life score was observed in those who met no guidelines (B = - 0.47, P = 0.02) and physical activity only (B = - 0.62, P = 0.03). Lastly, there were dose-response associations between the number of guidelines met and all three health-related outcomes (all P(trend) \u3c 0.05). Conclusions: In conclusion, meeting more 24-h movement guidelines was generally associated with more favorable health-related outcomes in youth with ASD. The low level of adherence to all three guidelines (2.0%) suggests the urgent need to promote the adoption of all the guidelines in this group

Meeting the 24-hour movement guidelines and health-related outcomes among youth with autism spectrum disorder: a seven-country observational study

Background: Meeting daily guidelines for physical activity, screen time, and sleep duration is associated with a host of health indicators for youth. In this cross-sectional observational study, we investigated the associations between adherence to the movement guidelines and health-related outcomes among youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).Methods: Parents of youth with ASD (10–17 years) from seven countries and regions were invited to provide online proxy-reports for child’s movement behaviors (i.e., physical activity, sleep and screen time), and health-related outcomes (i.e., body mass index [BMI], general health, and quality of life). A series of multiple linear regression analyses were used to examine the associations between meeting movement guidelines and health-related outcomes, adjusted for covariates.Results: The final sample consisted of 1165 youth with ASD. Compared with youth meeting all three guidelines, a higher BMI z-score was observed in those who met no guidelines (B = 0.62, P = 0.04), “sedentary time only” (B = 0.60, P = 0.047), and “physical activity plus sleep only” (B = 0.85, P = 0.04). Compared with meeting all three guidelines, meeting no guidelines was associated with poorer general health (B = − 0.46, P = 0.02). Further, compared with youth meeting all three guidelines, a lower quality of life score was observed in those who met no guidelines (B = − 0.47, P = 0.02) and “physical activity only” (B = − 0.62, P = 0.03). Lastly, there were dose–response associations between the number of guidelines met and all three health-related outcomes (all Ptrend Conclusions: In conclusion, meeting more 24-h movement guidelines was generally associated with more favorable health-related outcomes in youth with ASD. The low level of adherence to all three guidelines (2.0%) suggests the urgent need to promote the adoption of all the guidelines in this group.</p

Nitrate Respiration Protects Hypoxic Mycobacterium tuberculosis Against Acid- and Reactive Nitrogen Species Stresses

There are strong evidences that Mycobacterium tuberculosis survives in a non-replicating state in the absence of oxygen in closed lesions and granuloma in vivo. In addition, M. tuberculosis is acid-resistant, allowing mycobacteria to survive in acidic, inflamed lesions. The ability of M. tuberculosis to resist to acid was recently shown to contribute to the bacillus virulence although the mechanisms involved have yet to be deciphered. In this study, we report that M. tuberculosis resistance to acid is oxygen-dependent; whereas aerobic mycobacteria were resistant to a mild acid challenge (pH 5.5) as previously reported, we found microaerophilic and hypoxic mycobacteria to be more sensitive to acid. In hypoxic conditions, mild-acidity promoted the dissipation of the protonmotive force, rapid ATP depletion and cell death. Exogenous nitrate, the most effective alternate terminal electron acceptor after molecular oxygen, protected hypoxic mycobacteria from acid stress. Nitrate-mediated resistance to acidity was not observed for a respiratory nitrate reductase NarGH knock-out mutant strain. Furthermore, we found that nitrate respiration was equally important in protecting hypoxic non-replicating mycobacteria from radical nitrogen species toxicity. Overall, these data shed light on a new role for nitrate respiration in protecting M. tuberculosis from acidity and reactive nitrogen species, two environmental stresses likely encountered by the pathogen during the course of infection

Word sense disambiguation improves statistical machine translation

Recent research presents conflicting evidence on whether word sense disambiguation (WSD) systems can help to improve the performance of statistical machine translation (MT) systems. In this paper, we successfully integrate a state-of-the-art WSD system into a state-of-the-art hierarchical phrase-based MT system, Hiero. We show for the first time that integrating a WSD system improves the performance of a state-ofthe-art statistical MT system on an actual translation task. Furthermore, the improvement is statistically significant.

Are Malaysians Ready for the Cashless Society? Evidence from Malaysia’s Undergraduates

Moving to create a greater Malaysia, Bank Negara Malaysia is set to launch its digital banking framework by the end of 2019. Aligned with the goal, this study is conducted to examine the motivational factors affecting the adoption of cashless transaction system among undergraduates in Malaysia. This study adopted Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to examine the motivational factors that lead to the adoption of cashless transaction system. Findings shown that Perceived Usefulness (PU) and Perceived Ease of Use (PEoU) are positively associated to dependent variables, Adoption of Cashless Transaction System (ADT). In which PU has the greatest effects towards the adoption of cashless transaction syste

NUS-PT: Exploiting Parallel Texts for Word Sense Disambiguation in the English All-Words Tasks

We participated in the SemEval-2007 coarse-grained English all-words task and fine-grained English all-words task. We used a supervised learning approach with SVM as the learning algorithm. The knowledge sources used include local collocations, parts-of-speech, and surrounding words. We gathered training examples from English-Chinese parallel corpora, SEMCOR, and DSO corpus. While the fine-grained sense inventory of WordNet was used to train our system employed for the fine-grained English all-words task, our system employed for the coarse-grained English all-words task was trained with the coarse-grained sense inventory released by the task organizers. Our scores (for both recall and precision) are 0.825 and 0.587 for the coarse-grained English all-words task and fine-grained English all-words task respectively. These scores put our systems in the first place for the coarse-grained English all-words task1 and the second place for the fine-grained English all-words task.

Exploiting Parallel Texts for Word Sense Disambiguation: An Empirical Study

A central problem of word sense disambiguation (WSD) is the lack of manually sense-tagged data required for supervised learning. In this paper, we evaluate an approach to automatically acquire sensetagged training data from English-Chinese parallel corpora, which are then used for disambiguating the nouns in the SENSEVAL-2 English lexical sample task. Our investigation reveals that this method of acquiring sense-tagged data is promising. On a subset of the most difficult SENSEVAL-2 nouns, the accuracy difference between the two approaches is only 14.0%, and the difference could narrow further to 6.5% if we disregard the advantage that manually sense-tagged data have in their sense coverage. Our analysis also highlights the importance of the issue of domain dependence in evaluating WSD programs

Disclosures of human resource information in the annual reports of Singapore listed companies.

The objectives of this study are: (a) to determine the current human resource (HR) disclosure practices of Singapore listed companies; (b) to analyse the effects of company size, annual report award (ARA) winners/non-winners status and industry type on the extent of HR disclosures; and (c) to solicit auditors' professional views on the HR disclosures that might be desired and disclosed, and in the process improve companies' HR disclosure practices. Results indicate that the extent of HR disclosures in annual reports is significantly different across companies of different sizes and between annual report award winners/non-winners. However, industry type does not affect the extent of such disclosures