Visual and textual appeals in banner advertising: A Content analysis

This study investigated textual and visual variables of banner advertisements. A number of research questions were addressed by content analyzing banner advertisements from social media and social networking Websites, including YouTube and Facebook. Implications of linking types of banner advertisements to types of social media sites, including differences between visual and textual content of banner advertisements, are addressed. Results indicate that there were notable differences between banner advertisements found on these sites. Ads are more likely to contain greater visual aspects such as animation on social media sites than they are on social networking sites. Further studies should examine how visual and textual appeals affect recognition and attitudes towards a brand or product

Polymer chain generation for coarse-grained models using radical-like polymerization

An innovative method is proposed to generate configurations of coarse grained models for polymer melts. This method, largely inspired by chemical ``radical polymerization'', is divided in three stages: (i) nucleation of radicals (reacting molecules caching monomers); (ii) growth of chains within a solvent of monomers; (iii) termination: annihilation of radicals and removal of residual monomers. The main interest of this method is that relaxation is performed as chains are generated. Pure mono and poly-disperse polymers melts are generated and compared to the configurations generated by the Push Off method from Auhl et al.. A detailed study of the static properties (gyration radius, mean square internal distance, entanglement length) confirms that the radical-like polymerization technics is suitable to generate equilibrated melts. The method is flexible, and can be adapted to generate nano-structured polymers, namely diblock and triblock copolymers.Comment: 9 pages, 12 figure

Hybrid multi-layer Deep CNN/Aggregator feature for image classification

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) have established a remarkable performance benchmark in the field of image classification, displacing classical approaches based on hand-tailored aggregations of local descriptors. Yet DCNNs impose high computational burdens both at training and at testing time, and training them requires collecting and annotating large amounts of training data. Supervised adaptation methods have been proposed in the literature that partially re-learn a transferred DCNN structure from a new target dataset. Yet these require expensive bounding-box annotations and are still computationally expensive to learn. In this paper, we address these shortcomings of DCNN adaptation schemes by proposing a hybrid approach that combines conventional, unsupervised aggregators such as Bag-of-Words (BoW), with the DCNN pipeline by treating the output of intermediate layers as densely extracted local descriptors. We test a variant of our approach that uses only intermediate DCNN layers on the standard PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset and show performance significantly higher than the standard BoW model and comparable to Fisher vector aggregation but with a feature that is 150 times smaller. A second variant of our approach that includes the fully connected DCNN layers significantly outperforms Fisher vector schemes and performs comparably to DCNN approaches adapted to Pascal VOC 2007, yet at only a small fraction of the training and testing cost.Comment: Accepted in ICASSP 2015 conference, 5 pages including reference, 4 figures and 2 table

Between Encounter and Experience: Florida in the Cuban Imagination

The antecedents of the relationship between Florida and Cuba reach deeply into the sixteenth century, almost with the inception of European colonization. The peninsula loomed large in the imagination of the island. The enduring facets of this connection assumed discernable patterns early, principally in the form of successive waves of migration northward, spanning centuries, first by such personalities as Panfilo Narvaez and Hernando de Soto and most recently Elian Gonzilez. It is perhaps worth recalling that there was a time when Florida was once a dependency of Cuba, populated and subsidized from the island

The optimal duration of dual antiplatelet therapy in patients receiving percutaneous coronary intervention with drug-eluting stents

Background: The optimal duration of dual antiplatelet therapy (DAPT) following drugeluting stent (DES) implantation remains a subject of an ongoing debate. Methods: MEDLINE, EMBASE, Scopus and CENTRAL databases were searched for eligible randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that compared short-term (￡ 6 months) DAPT with long-term (≥ 12 months) DAPT following DES implantation. The primary endpoint was a composite of all-cause mortality, myocardial infarction (MI), target vessel revascularization (TVR), stroke, or major bleeding. The secondary outcome were the individual components of the primary outcome, cardiovascular death, stent thrombosis and any bleeding episode. Results: A total of 15,378 patients from 7 RCTs were studied. There were no statistically significant differences between the short-term and long-term DAPT groups with respect to the occurrence of the primary outcome (risk ratio [RR] 1.017; 0.872–1.186; I2 = 0%), all cause death (RR 0.896; 0.708–1.134), cardiovascular death (RR 0.924; 0.668–1.279), MI (RR 1.139; 0.887–1.461), TVR (RR 1.174; 0.916–1.505), stent thrombosis (RR 1.264; 0.786–2.032), and stroke (RR 0.876; 0.685–1.611). However, there was a statistically significant lower risk of major bleeding in the short-term DAPT group (RR 0.57; 0.36–0.90; p = 0.02). There were no statistically significant differences in the sub-group analysis of patients with diabetes and patients presenting with acute coronary syndrome, RR 1.029; 0.745–1.421 and RR 1.062; 0.785–1.438, respectively. Conclusions: There was no difference in efficacy outcomes between short-term and long-term DAPT following DES, even among high-risk patients. However, longer duration of DAPT was found to be associated with increased risk of major bleeding.

Infectious olecranon and patellar bursitis: short-course adjuvant antibiotic therapy is not a risk factor for recurrence in adult hospitalized patients

Objectives No evidence-based recommendations exist for the management of infectious bursitis. We examined epidemiology and risk factors for recurrence of septic bursitis. Specifically, we compared outcome in patients receiving bursectomy plus short-course adjuvant antibiotic therapy (≤7 days) with that of patients receiving bursectomy plus longer-course antibiotic therapy (>7 days). Patients and methods Retrospective study of adult patients with infectious olecranon and patellar bursitis requiring hospitalization at Geneva University Hospital from January 1996 to March 2009. Results We identified 343 episodes of infectious bursitis (237 olecranon and 106 patellar). Staphylococcus aureus predominated among the 256 cases with an identifiable pathogen (85%). Three hundred and twelve cases (91%) were treated surgically; 142 (41%) with one-stage bursectomy and closure and 146 with two-stage bursectomy. All received antibiotics for a median duration of 13 days with a median intravenous component of 3 days. Cure was achieved in 293 (85%) episodes. Total duration of antibiotic therapy [odds ratio (OR) 0.9; 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 0.8-1.1] showed no association with cure. In multivariate analysis, only immunosuppression was linked to recurrence (OR 5.6; 95% CI 1.9-18.4). Compared with ≤7 days, 8-14 days of antibiotic treatment (OR 0.6; 95% CI 0.1-2.9) or >14 days of antibiotic treatment (OR 0.9; 95% CI 0.1-10.7) was equivalent, as was the intravenous component (OR 1.1; 95% CI 1.0-1.3). Conclusions In severe infectious bursitis requiring hospitalization, adjuvant antibiotic therapy might be limited to 7 days in non-immunosuppressed patient