Black White Colour Bias among Young Malaysian Chinese Children

Previous studies of preschool children in the United States, Western Europe and Eastern Asia have demonstrated a bias favouring the colour white relative to the colour black. In this study, the Colour l.1eaning Test II was administered to urban Malaysian Chinese preschoolers, aged 5 and 6 years. The mean Colour Meaning Test II score of 18.33 indicated a definite pro-white/anti-black bias. The sex and age of the child was found to have no significant effect on the test score, The high level of bias favouring the colour white relative to the colour black suggest that the bias is universal and that strong influences have brought about this high level of bias. These children have no direct contact. with dark-skinned (black) and light-skinned (white) persons and do not live in II society in which there is a great socio-economic chasm between black and white races, but they are familiar with the concept of races as it relates to black-white skin colour and the designation of persons by colour names through watching television. This study lends support to the main causal factors that have been suggested for colour bias, which are cultural symbolism, mass media, literature and early diurnal experienc

Passive Upper Limb Assessment Device

AbstractStroke is the leading cause of disability. Reaching movement is the most important movement for many daily activities routine. Rehabilitation is to encourage and enhanced recovery process. Conventional rehabilitation is one-to-one intervention where labour intensive and lack of repeatability. In addition, the stroke assessments by physiotherapist are subjective and not independent. Thus, this paper will describe the design and development of non-motorized system for assessing the patients’ motor function. This system will be used in the future to find the correlation between conventional assessments scales such Fugl-Mayer Assessment (FMA), Chedoke-McMaster Stroke Assessment Scale (CMSA) and Motor Assessment Scale (MAS) and robotic assessment

Important Parameters for Hand Function Assessment of Stroke Patients

Clinical scales such as Fugl-Meyer Assessment and Motor Assessment Scale are widely used to evaluate stroke patient's motor performance. However, the scoring systems of these assessments provide only rough estimation, making it difficult to objectively quantify impairment and disability or even rehabilitation progress throughout their rehabilitation period. In contrast, robot-based assessments are objective, repeatable, and could potentially reduce the assessment time. However, robot-based assessment scales are not as well established as conventional assessment scale and the correlation to conventional assessment scale is unclear. This paper discusses the important parameters in order to assess the hand function of stroke patients. This knowledge will provide a contribution to the development of a new robot-based assessment device effectively by including the important parameters in the device. The important parameters were included in development of iRest and yielded promising results that illustrate the potential of the important parameters in assessing the hand function of stroke patients

Streptococcal M1 protein triggers farnesyltransferase-dependent formation of CXC chemokines in alveolar macrophages and neutrophil infiltration in the lung.

M1 serotype of Streptococcus pyogenes plays an important role in streptococcal toxic shock syndrome. Simvastatin, a HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor, has been shown to inhibit streptococcal M1 protein-induced acute lung damage although downstream mechanisms remain elusive. Protein isoprenylation, such as farnesylation and geranylgeranylation, has been suggested to regulate anti-inflammatory effects exerted by statins. Herein, we examined the effect of a farnesyltransferase inhibitor (FTI-277) on M1 protein-triggered lung inflammation. Male C57BL/6 mice were treated with FTI-277 prior to M1 protein challenge. Bronchoalveolar fluid and lung tissue were harvested for quantification of neutrophil recruitment, edema and CXC chemokine formation. Flow cytometry was used to determine Mac-1 expression on neutrophils. Gene expression of CXC chemokines was determined in alveolar macrophages by using quantitative RT-PCR. We found that administration of FTI-277 markedly decreased M1 protein-induced accumulation of neutrophils, edema formation and tissue damage in the lung. Notably, inhibition of farnesyltransferase abolished M1 protein-evoked production of CXC chemokines in the lung and gene expression of CXC chemokines in alveolar macrophages. Moreover, FTI-277 completely inhibited chemokine-induced neutrophil migration in vitro. However, farnesyltransferase inhibition had no effect on M1 protein-induced expression of Mac-1 on neutrophils. Our findings suggest that farnesyltransferase is a potent regulator of CXC chemokine formation in alveolar macrophages and that inhibition of farnesyltransferase not only reduces neutrophil recruitment but also attenuates acute lung injury provoked by streptococcal M1 protein. We conclude that farnesyltransferase activity is a potential target in order to attenuate acute lung damage in streptococcal infections

Performance of Eular-Maruyama, 2-stage SRK and 4-stage SRK in approximating the strong solution of stochastic model

Stochastic differential equations play a prominent role in many application areas including finance, biology and epidemiology. By incorporating random elements to ordinary differential equation system, a system of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) arises. This leads to a more complex insight of the physical phenomena than their deterministic counterpart. However, most of the SDEs do not have an analytical solution where numerical method is the best way to resolve this problem. Recently, much work had been done in applying numerical methods for solving SDEs. A very general class of Stochastic Runge-Kutta, (SRK) had been studied and 2-stage SRK with order convergence of 1.0 and 4-stage SRK with order convergence of 1.5 were discussed. In this study, we compared the performance of Euler-Maruyama, 2-stage SRK and 4-stage SRK in approximating the strong solutions of stochastic logistic model which describe the cell growth of C. acetobutylicum P262. The MS-stability functions of these schemes were calculated and regions of MS-stability are given. We also perform the comparison for the performance of these methods based on their global errors

A hand segmentation scheme using clustering technique in homogeneous background

Segmentation serves as the first step in any image analysis and it plays a very vital role as the success of the image analysis in the later stage depends very much on a suitable and robust segmentation scheme. Hand segmentation on the other hand is the first step for hand image analysis such as hand gesture recognition. An image subtraction method is implemented on a gray level image, RGB color image and image in normalized RGB color space under homogeneous background to investigate their appropriateness for segmentation. A skin color model based on the clustering property of skin color is then built to improve the segmentation result obtained from the image subtraction on the normalized RGB image. It is found that the proposed skin color modeling technique is able to improve the segmentation and provide a faster and reliable method for hand segmentation

Cabaran dan prospek komunikasi antarabudaya dalam hubungan antarabangsa bagi menuju alaf mendatang

Kertaskerja ini membincangkan tentang kepentingan komunikasi antarabudaya sesebuah negara.Antara lain, kertaskerja ini dimuatkan dengan pendedahan terhadap konsep-konsep budaya, komunikasi, komunikasi antarabudaya.Dengan mengambil Malaysia sebagai contoh, aspek-aspek komunikasi yang diamalkan oleh masyarakat Melayu juga turut diperincikan. Cabaran-cabaran serta cadangan kepada cara untuk mengatasi halangan terhadap komunikasi antarabangsa turut dibincangkan

ATLAS: A Traffic Load Aware Sensor MAC Design for Collaborative Body Area Sensor Networks

In collaborative body sensor networks, namely wireless body area networks (WBANs), each of the physical sensor applications is used to collaboratively monitor the health status of the human body. The applications of WBANs comprise diverse and dynamic traffic loads such as very low-rate periodic monitoring (i.e., observation) data and high-rate traffic including event-triggered bursts. Therefore, in designing a medium access control (MAC) protocol for WBANs, energy conservation should be the primary concern during low-traffic periods, whereas a balance between satisfying high-throughput demand and efficient energy usage is necessary during high-traffic times. In this paper, we design a traffic load-aware innovative MAC solution for WBANs, called ATLAS. The design exploits the superframe structure of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, and it adaptively uses the contention access period (CAP), contention free period (CFP) and inactive period (IP) of the superframe based on estimated traffic load, by applying a dynamic “wh” (whenever which is required) approach. Unlike earlier work, the proposed MAC design includes load estimation for network load-status awareness and a multi-hop communication pattern in order to prevent energy loss associated with long range transmission. Finally, ATLAS is evaluated through extensive simulations in ns-2 and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the protocol

Photoluminescence revealed higher order plasmonic resonance modes and their unexpected frequency blue shifts in silver-coated silica nanoparticle antennas

© 2019 by the authors. Higher order plasmonic resonance modes and their frequency blue shifts in silver-coated silica nanoparticle antennas are studied. Synthesizing them with a wet chemistry method, silica (SiO2) nanoparticles were enclosed within silver shells with different thicknesses. A size-dependent Drude model was used to model the plasmonic shells and their optical losses. Two higher order plasmonic resonances were identified for each case in these simulations. The photoluminescence spectroscopy (PL) experimental results, in good agreement with their simulated values, confirmed the presence of those two higher order resonant modes and their resonance frequencies. When compared with pure metallic Ag nanoparticles, size-induced blue shifts were observed in these resonance frequencies