Aspects of cardiovascular risk in an Australian population study

Prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD), a leading cause of death in men and women, is both a global and national public health priority. Prevention efforts have generally focused on well-known lifestyle (e.g., physical inactivity, unhealthy diet, smoking) and metabolic (e.g., overweight/obesity, hypertension, hyperlipidaemia) risk factors. It is also important for public health strategies to consider emerging risk factors, innovative approaches to risk factors, and evidence in middle-aged men and women, to develop effective prevention strategies. This thesis explored innovative aspects of cardiovascular risk in a large cohort of middle-aged and older Australian men and women (“the 45 and Up Study”) by examining: 1) emerging or lesser known risk factors such as raw vegetable intake (Chapter 3), sedentary behaviour (Chapter 4, Appendix 1) and psychological distress (Chapter 5); 2) the single versus joint influence of lifestyle risk factors on incident type 2 diabetes (Chapter 4, Appendix 1) and hypertension (Chapter 5); 3) potential gender differences (Chapters 3-5, Appendix 1), and female-specific behaviours such as breastfeeding (Chapters 6-7). Overall, findings support Australian recommendations for fruit and vegetable intake, physical activity, alcohol intake and infant breastfeeding. While the importance of reducing known risk factors for CVD prevention was evident, the role of raw vegetable intake, sedentary behaviour and psychological distress was inconclusive. Breastfeeding was associated with a lower maternal risk of CVD. Findings confirmed that adopting a cluster of healthy lifestyle behaviours can reduce CVD risk in the middle-aged and older population. Potential gender differences were explored and identified. This thesis contributes to the literature by exploring innovative aspects of cardiovascular risk that are relevant to middle-aged adults, particularly women, as well as informs health care providers, researchers and policy makers

EFL teachers’ perceptions of professional development activities and their effects in a non-anglosphere context

Providing teachers with adequate professional development (PD) is a central tenet to enhance education quality. In Vietnam, despite the blossoming of PD activities promoted over the past decade, the central question of how effectively these existing activities facilitate changes in teachers’ practice has been under-researched. This mixed-method study responded to the scarcity in understanding the effectiveness of PD activities in the Vietnamese setting by employing a questionnaire administered to 80 high school teachers and six semi-structured interviews. Evidence from the questionnaire and interviews revealed that EFL teachers participated in PD activities on an occasional basis. Institution-internal or in-house professional activities were most common, while joining a professional affiliation such as a TESOL association was the rarest. Also, PD activities have positively reinforced the teachers’ language proficiency, teaching practice, and planning practical lessons to meet students’ learning needs. The discussions and recommendations are made for enhancing the quality of PD activities

LusRegTes: A Regression Testing Tool for Lustre Programs

Lustre is a synchronous data-flow declarative language widely used for safety-critical applications (avionics, energy, transport...). In such applications, the testing activity for detecting errors of the system plays a crucial role. During the development and maintenance processes, Lustre programs are often evolving, so regression testing should be performed to detect bugs. In this paper, we present a tool for automatic regression testing of Lustre programs. We have defined an approach to generate test cases in regression testing of Lustre programs.  In this approach, a Lustre program is represented by an operator network, then the set of paths is identified and the path activation conditions are symbolically computed for each version. Regression test cases are generated by comparing paths between versions. The approach was implemented in a tool, called LusRegTes, in order to automate the test process for Lustre programs

Graph-based indexing and retrieval of lifelog data

Understanding the relationship between objects in an image is an important challenge because it can help to describe actions in the image. In this paper, a graphical data structure, named “Scene Graph”, is utilized to represent an encoded informative visual relationship graph for an image, which we suggest has a wide range of potential applications. This scene graph is applied and tested in the popular domain of lifelogs, and specifically in the challenge of known-item retrieval from lifelogs. In this work, every lifelog image is represented by a scene graph, and at retrieval time, this scene graph is compared with the semantic graph, parsed from a textual query. The result is combined with location or date information to determine the matching items. The experiment shows that this technique can outperform a conventional method

Performance of multi-hop cognitive MIMO relaying networks with joint constraint of intercept probability and limited interference

In this paper, we propose a multi-hop multiple input multiple output (MIMO) decode-and-forward relaying protocol in cognitive radio networks. In this protocol, a multi-antenna secondary source attempts to send its data to a multi-antenna secondary destination with assistance of multiple intermediate multi-antenna nodes, in presence of a multi-antenna secondary eavesdropper. A primary network includes a primary transmitter and a primary receiver which are equipped with multiple antennas, and use transmit antenna selection (TAS) and selection combining (SC) to communicate with each other. Operating on the underlay spectrum sharing method, the secondary source and relay nodes have to adjust their transmit power so that the outage performance of the primary network is not harmful and satisfy the quality of service (QoS). Moreover, these secondary nodes also reduce their transmit power so that the intercept probability (IP) at the eavesdropper at each hop is below a desired value. To improve the outage performance of the secondary network under the joint constraint of IP and limited interference, the TAS/SC method is employed to relay the source data hop-by-hop to the destination. We derived exact closed-form expressions of the end-to-end (e2e) outage probability (OP) and IP of the proposed protocol over Rayleigh fading channels. Monte Carlo simulations are then performed to verify the theoretical derivations

Characterization of pig farms in Hung Yen, Hai Duong and Bac Ninh provinces

peer reviewedIn order to characterization of pig farms in the Red River Delta, a study was conducted on 90 pig farms in Hung Yen, Hai Duong and Bac Ninh provinces from June to December 2006. Results show that most of the pig farms had been built for five years with a small size (0.5 hectare per farm). The invested capital was about 300-400 millions VND per farm. Four main sow groups used in the farms included crossbred exotic sows (51.1%), crossbred sow between local and exotic breeds (14.4%), purebred Landrace and Yorkshire breeds (15.6 and 18.9%, respectively). The boars were various (Duroc 30%, Yorkshire 21%, Landrace 13%, PiÐtrain × Duroc 36% and others). The pigs farms were faced with several difficulties such as limited land, lack of invested capital, uncontrolled quality of breeding pigs, high costs of feed, poor hygiene condition and diseases

Myscéal: an experimental interactive lifelog retrieval system for LSC'20

The Lifelog Search Challenge (LSC), is an annual comparative benchmarking activity for comparing approaches to interactive retrieval from multi-modal lifelogs. Being an interactive search challenge, issues such as retrieval accuracy, search speed and usability of interfaces are key challenges that must be addressed by every participant. In this paper, we introduce Myscéal, an interactive lifelog retrieval engine designed to support novice users to retrieve items of interest from a large multimodal lifelog. Additionally, we also introduce a new similarity measure called “aTFIDF”, to match a user’s free-text information need with the multimodal lifelog index

Myscéal 2.0: a revised experimental interactive lifelog retrieval system for LSC'21

Building an interactive retrieval system for lifelogging contains many challenges due to massive multi-modal personal data besides the requirement of accuracy and rapid response for such a tool. The Lifelog Search Challenge (LSC) is the international lifelog retrieval competition that inspires researchers to develop their systems to cope with the challenges and evaluates the effectiveness of their solutions. In this paper, we upgrade our previous Myscéal 2.0 and present Myscéal 2.0 system for the LSC'21 with the improved features inspired by the novice users experiments. The experiments show that a novice user achieved more than half of the expert score on average. To mitigate the gap of them, some potential enhancements were identified and integrated to the enhanced version

Monitoring Cirrus Cloud and Tropopause Height over Hanoi Using a Compact Lidar System

Abstract. Cirrus clouds in the upper troposphere and the lower stratosphere have attracted great attention due to their important role and impact on the atmospheric radioactive balance. Because cirrus clouds are located high in the atmosphere, their study requires a high resolution remote sensing technique not only for detection but also for the characterization of their properties. The lidar technique with its inherent high sensitivity and resolution has become an indispensible tool for studying and improving our understanding of cirrus cloud. Using lidar technique we can simultaneously measure the cloud height, thickness and follow its temporal evolution. In this paper we describe the development of a compact and highly sensitive lidar system with the aim to remotely monitor for the first time the cirrus clouds over Hanoi (21001’42’’N, 105051’12’’W). From the lidar data collected during the year 2011. We derive the mean cloud height, location of cloud top, the cloud mean thickness and their temporal evolution. We then compare the location of the cloud top with the position of the tropopause determined the radiosonde data and found good that the distance between cloud top and tropopause remains fairly stable, indicating that generally the top of cirrus clouds is the good tracer of the tropopause. We found that the cirrus clouds are generally located at height between 11.2 to 15 km with average height of 13.4 km. Their thickness is between 0.3 and 3.8 km with average value of 1.7 km. We also compare the properties of cirrus cloud with that observed at other locations around the world based on lidar technique

Multichannel Photon Counting Lidar Measurements Using USB-based Digital Storage Oscilloscope

We present a simple method of making multichannel photon counting measurements of weak lidar signal from large ranges, using commonly available USB-based digital storage oscilloscopes. The single photon pulses from compact photomultiplier tubes are amplified and stretched so that the pulses are large and broad enough to be sampled efficiently by the USB oscilloscopes. A software interface written in Labview is then used to count the number of photon pulses in each of the prescribed time bins to form the histogram of LIDAR signal. This method presents a flexible alternative to the modular multichannel scalers and facilitate the development of sensitive lidar systems