Reply to: Atom gravimeters and the gravitational redshift

We stand by our result [H. Mueller et al., Nature 463, 926-929 (2010)]. The comment [P. Wolf et al., Nature 467, E1 (2010)] revisits an interesting issue that has been known for decades, the relationship between test of the universality of free fall and redshift experiments. However, it arrives at its conclusions by applying the laws of physics that are questioned by redshift experiments; this precludes the existence of measurable signals. Since this issue applies to all classical redshift tests as well as atom interferometry redshift tests, these experiments are equivalent in all aspects in question.Comment: Reply to P. Wolf et al., arXiv:1009.060

Cross-cultural adaptation of children´s environmental health questionnaires for English nursing students

Objectives: Children are among the most vulnerable population groups with regard to environmental risks. Nursing students must be fully educated on children’s environmental health as they are in a key position to prevent and reduce the effects of environmental hazards. The main objective of this study was to adapt and validate an English language version of two questionnaires about children’s health and the environment, to assess the knowledge and skills of student nurses in England. Design: Observational cross-sectional study. Setting: A university in Southern England. Method: The study involves translating, adapting and validating the Children’s Environmental Health Knowledge Questionnaire (ChEHK-Q) and the Children’s Environmental Health Skills Questionnaire (ChEHS-Q) with nursing students in England (N = 232). Results: The psychometric characteristics of both questionnaires were strong. Infit and outfit values were close to 1. The reliability values for the items and people were 0.96 and 0.79 for ChEHK-Q and 0.98 and 0.89 for ChEHS-Q, respectively. Only 52 (22.41%) and 77 (33.62%) participants had at least good knowledge and skills, respectively. Higher knowledge and skills were found with respect to the vulnerability of children and identification of environmental risks in the home. Lower levels of knowledge and skills were found with respect to the effects of pesticides and the assessment of neoplastic pollutants. Conclusion: Findings demonstrate deficiencies in nursing competencies related to children’s environmental health. The use of these questionnaires will facilitate improvement in both knowledge and skills related to children’s environmental health among future nurses

Spectroscopy of free radicals and radical containing entrance-channel complexes in superfluid helium nano-droplets

The spectroscopy of free radicals and radical containing entrance-channel complexes embedded in superfluid helium nano-droplets is reviewed. The collection of dopants inside individual droplets in the beam represents a micro-canonical ensemble, and as such each droplet may be considered an isolated cryo-reactor. The unique properties of the droplets, namely their low temperature (0.4 K) and fast cooling rates ($\sim10^{16}$ K s$^{-1}$) provides novel opportunities for the formation and high-resolution studies of molecular complexes containing one or more free radicals. The production methods of radicals are discussed in light of their applicability for embedding the radicals in helium droplets. The spectroscopic studies performed to date on molecular radicals and on entrance / exit-channel complexes of radicals with stable molecules are detailed. The observed complexes provide new information on the potential energy surfaces of several fundamental chemical reactions and on the intermolecular interactions present in open-shell systems. Prospects of further experiments of radicals embedded in helium droplets are discussed, especially the possibilities to prepare and study high-energy structures and their controlled manipulation, as well as the possibility of fundamental physics experiments.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures, 4 tables (RevTeX

The Pioneer Anomaly

Radio-metric Doppler tracking data received from the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft from heliocentric distances of 20-70 AU has consistently indicated the presence of a small, anomalous, blue-shifted frequency drift uniformly changing with a rate of ~6 x 10^{-9} Hz/s. Ultimately, the drift was interpreted as a constant sunward deceleration of each particular spacecraft at the level of a_P = (8.74 +/- 1.33) x 10^{-10} m/s^2. This apparent violation of the Newton's gravitational inverse-square law has become known as the Pioneer anomaly; the nature of this anomaly remains unexplained. In this review, we summarize the current knowledge of the physical properties of the anomaly and the conditions that led to its detection and characterization. We review various mechanisms proposed to explain the anomaly and discuss the current state of efforts to determine its nature. A comprehensive new investigation of the anomalous behavior of the two Pioneers has begun recently. The new efforts rely on the much-extended set of radio-metric Doppler data for both spacecraft in conjunction with the newly available complete record of their telemetry files and a large archive of original project documentation. As the new study is yet to report its findings, this review provides the necessary background for the new results to appear in the near future. In particular, we provide a significant amount of information on the design, operations and behavior of the two Pioneers during their entire missions, including descriptions of various data formats and techniques used for their navigation and radio-science data analysis. As most of this information was recovered relatively recently, it was not used in the previous studies of the Pioneer anomaly, but it is critical for the new investigation.Comment: 165 pages, 40 figures, 16 tables; accepted for publication in Living Reviews in Relativit

Visceral fat area and cardiometabolic risk: The Kardiovize study

BACKGROUND: Visceral fat is associated with adiposity-based complications. Bioimpedance measurement allows estimation of visceral fat area (VFA) in an easy manner. However, a validated cut-off value for VFA by bioimpedance associated with cardiometabolic risk is lacking in European population. AIM: To determine cut-off values of VFA measured via bioimpedance associated with cardiometabolic risk. METHODS: Random cross-sectional Czech population-based sample of 25-64 years old subjects. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves were used and the area under the curve (AUC), sensitivity, and specificity were calculated. The Cardiometabolic Disease Staging System (CMDS) was used to classify cardiometabolic risk: Stage 1 - 1 or 2 metabolic syndrome (MetS) components, without impaired fasting glucose (IFG); Stage 2 - MetS or IFG; Stage 3 - MetS with IFG; Stage 4 - type 2 diabetes and/or cardiovascular disease. RESULTS: 2052 participants (54.5% females, median age 49 years) were included. Median VFA (inter-quartile range) were 82.2 cm2 (54.8) in men and 89.8 cm2 (55.6) in women. The best VFA cut-offs associated with Stage 1 in men and women were 71 cm2 (sensitivity = 0.654; specificity = 0.427) and 83 cm2 (sensitivity = 0.705; specificity = 0.556) ; Stage 2: 84 cm2 (sensitivity = 0.673; specificity = 0.551) and 98 cm2 (sensitivity = 0.702; specificity = 0.628) ; Stage 3: 90 cm2 (sensitivity = 0.886; specificity = 0.605) and 109 cm2 (sensitivity = 0.755; specificity = 0.704); Stage 4: 91 cm2 (sensitivity = 0.625; specificity = 0.611) and 81 cm2 (sensitivity = 0.695; specificity = 0.448), respectively. CONCLUSION: A cut-off value of VFA of 71 cm2 in men and 83 cm2 in women exhibited the earliest stage of cardiometabolic risk, and 90 cm2 in men and 109 cm2 in women showed the best performance to detect risk

Ground truth annotation of traffic video data

This paper presents a software application to generate ground-truth data on video files from traffic surveillance cameras used for Intelligent Transportation Systems (IT systems). The computer vision system to be evaluated counts the number of vehicles that cross a line per time unit intensity-, the average speed and the occupancy. The main goal of the visual interface presented in this paper is to be easy to use without the requirement of any specific hardware. It is based on a standard laptop or desktop computer and a Jog shuttle wheel. The setup is efficient and comfortable because one hand of the annotating person is almost all the time on the space key of the keyboard while the other hand is on the jog shuttle wheel. The mean time required to annotate a video file ranges from 1 to 5 times its duration (per lane) depending on the content. Compared to general purpose annotation tool a time factor gain of about 7 times is achieved.This work was funded by the Spanish Government project MARTA under the CENIT program and CICYT contract TEC2009-09146.Mossi García, JM.; Albiol Colomer, AJ.; Albiol Colomer, A.; Oliver Moll, J. (2014). Ground truth annotation of traffic video data. Multimedia Tools and Applications. 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-013-1396-xS114Albiol A et al (2011) Detection of parked vehicles using spatiotemporal maps. IEEE Trans Intell Transport Syst 12(4):1277–1291Blunsden SJ, Fisher R (2010) The BEHAVE video dataset: ground truthed video for multi-person behavior classification. Annal British Mach Vis Assoc 4:1–12Bradski G, Kaehler A (2008) Learning OpenCV: Computer vision with the OpenCV library. O'Reilly Media, IncorporatedBrooke J. SUS: a “quick and dirty” usability scale. Usability evaluation in industry. Taylor and FrancisBrostow GJ et al (2009) Semantic object classes in video: a high-definition ground truth database. Pattern Recognit Lett 30(2):88–97Buch N et al (2011) A review of computer vision techniques for the analysis of urban traffic. IEEE Trans Intell Transp Syst 12(3):920–939D’Orazio T et al. (2009) A semi-automatic system for ground truth generation of soccer video sequences. Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance, 2009. AVSS’09. Sixth IEEE International Conference on (Sep. 2009), 559–564Dollar P et al (2012) Pedestrian detection: an evaluation of the state of the art. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 34(4):743–761Faro A et al (2011) Adaptive background modeling integrated with luminosity sensors and occlusion processing for reliable vehicle detection. IEEE Trans Intell Transport Syst 12(4):1398–1412Giro-i-Nieto X et al (2010) GAT: a graphical annotation tool for semantic regions. Multimed Tool Appl 46(2–3):155–174i-LIDS. Image Library for Intelligent Detection Systems: www.ilids.co.uk . Home Office Scientific Development Branch, United Kingdom. Last Accessed February 2013Kasturi R et al (2009) Framework for performance evaluation of face, text, and vehicle detection and tracking in video: data, metrics, and protocol. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 31(2):319–336Laganière R (2011) OpenCV 2 computer vision application programming cookbook. Packt Pub LimitedLorist MM et al (2000) Mental fatigue and task control: planning and preparation. Psychophysiology 37(5):614–625Russell B et al (2008) LabelMe: a database and web-based tool for image annotation. Int J Comput Vis 77(1):157–173Serrano M, Gracía J, Patricio M, Molina J (2010). Interactive video annotation tool. Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence, 325–332Traffic City Cameras. Ajuntament de València, Spain. http://camaras.valencia.es . Last Accessed February 2013TREC video retrieval evaluation. http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/trecvid/Vezzani R, Cucchiara R (2010) Video Surveillance Online Repository (ViSOR): an integrated framework. Multimed Tool Appl 50(2):359–380ViPER: the video performance evaluation resource: http://viper-toolkit.sourceforge.net/Volkmer T et al. (2005) A web-based system for collaborative annotation of large image and video collections: an evaluation and user study. Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia (New York, NY, USA, 2005), 892–901Zhang HB, Li SA, Chen SY, Su SZ, Duh DJ, Li SZ (2012) Adaptive photograph retrieval method. Multimedia Tools and Applications, Published online September 2012.Zou Y et al (2011) Traffic incident classification at intersections based on image sequences by HMM/SVM classifiers. Multimed Tool Appl 52(1):133–14

Dysglycemia and Abnormal Adiposity Drivers of Cardiometabolic-Based Chronic Disease in the Czech Population: Biological, Behavioral, and Cultural/Social Determinants of Health

In contrast to the decreasing burden related to cardiovascular disease (CVD), the burden related to dysglycemia and adiposity complications is increasing in Czechia, and local drivers must be identified. A comprehensive literature review was performed to evaluate biological, behavioral, and environmental drivers of dysglycemia and abnormal adiposity in Czechia. Additionally, the structure of the Czech healthcare system was described. The prevalence of obesity in men and diabetes in both sexes has been increasing over the past 30 years. Possible reasons include the Eastern European eating pattern, high prevalence of physical inactivity and health illiteracy, education, and income-related health inequalities. Despite the advanced healthcare system based on the compulsory insurance model with free-for-service healthcare and a wide range of health-promoting initiatives, more effective strategies to tackle the adiposity/dysglycemia are needed. In conclusion, the disease burden related to dysglycemia and adiposity in Czechia remains high but is not translated into greater CVD. This discordant relationship likely depends more on other factors, such as improvements in dyslipidemia and hypertension control. A reconceptualization of abnormal adiposity and dysglycemia into a more actionable cardiometabolic-based chronic disease model is needed to improve the approach to these conditions. This review can serve as a platform to investigate causal mechanisms and secure effective management of cardiometabolic-based chronic disease

Genomic analysis of the function of the transcription factor gata3 during development of the Mammalian inner ear

We have studied the function of the zinc finger transcription factor gata3 in auditory system development by analysing temporal profiles of gene expression during differentiation of conditionally immortal cell lines derived to model specific auditory cell types and developmental stages. We tested and applied a novel probabilistic method called the gamma Model for Oligonucleotide Signals to analyse hybridization signals from Affymetrix oligonucleotide arrays. Expression levels estimated by this method correlated closely (p<0.0001) across a 10-fold range with those measured by quantitative RT-PCR for a sample of 61 different genes. In an unbiased list of 26 genes whose temporal profiles clustered most closely with that of gata3 in all cell lines, 10 were linked to Insulin-like Growth Factor signalling, including the serine/threonine kinase Akt/PKB. Knock-down of gata3 in vitro was associated with a decrease in expression of genes linked to IGF-signalling, including IGF1, IGF2 and several IGF-binding proteins. It also led to a small decrease in protein levels of the serine-threonine kinase Akt2/PKB beta, a dramatic increase in Akt1/PKB alpha protein and relocation of Akt1/PKB alpha from the nucleus to the cytoplasm. The cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p27(kip1), a known target of PKB/Akt, simultaneously decreased. In heterozygous gata3 null mice the expression of gata3 correlated with high levels of activated Akt/PKB. This functional relationship could explain the diverse function of gata3 during development, the hearing loss associated with gata3 heterozygous null mice and the broader symptoms of human patients with Hearing-Deafness-Renal anomaly syndrome