Spanning trees for the geometry and dynamics of compact polymers

Using a mapping of compact polymers on the Manhattan lattice to spanning trees, we calculate exactly the average number of bends at infinite temperature. We then find, in a high temperature approximation, the energy of the system as a function of bending rigidity and polymer elasticity. We identify the universal mechanism for the relaxation of compact polymers and then endow the model with physically motivated dynamics in the convenient framework of the trees. We find aging and domain coarsening after quenches in temperature. We explain the slow dynamics in terms of the geometrical interconnections between the energy and the dynamics.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

The Influence of Fasting and Energy Restricting Diets on IGF-1 Levels in Humans: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Fasting and energy restricting diets have a potential means of delaying or preventing the onset of a range of age-related metabolic and neoplastic diseases. Consistently at the centre of this effect appears to be a significant reduction in circulating IGF-1 levels. The aim of the current systematic review and meta-analysis was to determine the influence of fasting and energy restriction on IGF-1 levels in human subjects. Methods: A comprehensive systematic search was conducted from onset of the database to February 2019 in Embase, MEDLINE/PubMed, and SCOPUS to identify randomized clinical trials that investigating the impact of fasting or energy restriction circulating IGF-1 levels. Effect size was reported as weighted mean difference (WMD) and 95 confidence intervals (CI) using a random-effects models. Subgroup analysis was performed to identify the probable source of heterogeneity among trials. Results: Total pooling of fasting and energy restriction randomised controlled trials in WMD analysis revealed no significant effect on circulating IGF-1 levels (WMD: �16.41 ng/ml, 95 CI: �35.88, 3.07). Sub grouped analysis fasting regimens appeared to substantially reduce IGF-1 (WMD: -28.87 ng/ml, 95 CI: �43.69, �14.05, I 2 = 00), energy restricting regimens failed to do the same (WMD: -10.98 ng/ml, 95 CI: �33.08, 11.11, I 2 = 90). Within this final subgrouping, it was observed that only energy restriction regimens of 50 or greater of normal daily energy intake were capable of significantly reducing IGF-1 levels (WMD: -36.57 ng/ml, 95 CI: �59.19, �13.95, I 2 = 00). Finally, a meta regression were noted in which the percentage restriction of daily energy intake inversely correlated with plasma IGF-1 levels (p = 0.04). Conclusion: This study uncovered that fasting significantly reduced levels of IGF-1, while energy restriction diets were successful only when intake was reduced by 50 or more. © 2019 Elsevier B.V

Human action recognition via skeletal and depth based feature fusion

This paper addresses the problem of recognizing human actions captured with depth cameras. Human action recognition is a challenging task as the articulated action data is high dimensional in both spatial and temporal domains. An effective approach to handle this complexity is to divide human body into different body parts according to human skeletal joint positions, and performs recognition based on these part-based feature descriptors. Since different types of features could share some similar hidden structures, and different actions may be well characterized by properties common to all features (sharable structure) and those specific to a feature (specific structure), we propose a joint group sparse regression-based learning method to model each action. Our method can mine the sharable and specific structures among its part-based multiple features meanwhile imposing the importance of these part-based feature structures by joint group sparse regularization, in favor of discriminative part-based feature structure selection. To represent the dynamics and appearance of the human body parts, we employ part-based multiple features extracted from skeleton and depth data respectively. Then, using the group sparse regularization techniques, we have derived an algorithm for mining the key part-based features in the proposed learning framework. The resulting features derived from the learnt weight matrices are more discriminative for multi-task classification. Through extensive experiments on three public datasets, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods

DEVELOPING A LOCAL – CULTURAL CULINARY READING WORKBOOK FOR JASA BOGA MAJOR OF SMK NEGERI 5 PONTIANAK

Abstract : This study was to develop a local culture – based English reading workbook as the supplementary materials for the second year students of Jasa Boga major of SMK Negeri 5 Pontianak. The fundamental thought underlied this study was to support Jasa Boga students with expertise of English materials which relevant to their major. The workbook was developed within five phases of : Analisys; Design; Development; Implementation; and Evaluation (ADDIE). The data were gathered from questionnaires, interview, checklists, and fieldnotes. From the findings, it is indicated that the workbook is worth using in terms of its usability and relevancy. The positive responses given by the students, teacher, and validators towards the materials and the texts readability calculations proved these. In short, this study has succeeded developing a qualified reading workbook for Jasa Boga students as the supplementary materials for fulfilling in their needs.   Key words : Local Culture, Reading Workbook, “Jasa Boga”     Abstrak : Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mengembangkan lembar kerja siswa Bahasa Inggris yang berdasarkan budaya lokal sebagai materi pelengkap untuk siswa kelas dua jurusan Jasa Boga SMK Negeri 5 Pontianak. Pikiran dasar dari penelitian ini bermaksud untuk mendukung siswa jurusan Jasa Boga dengan materi keahlian yang menggunakan Bahasa Inggris yang sesuai dengan jurusan mereka. Buku kerja ini dikembangkan dalam lima fase, yaitu Analisys, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE). Data penelitian diperoleh dari kuisioner, wawancara, ceklis, catatan lapangan, dan validasi. Dari hasil penelitian, ditemukan bahwa buku kerja ini layak untuk digunakan karena kepraktisan dan relevansinya. Respon positif yang diberikan siswa, guru, dan validator terhadap materi, serta perhitingan keterbacaan teks membuktikan hal tersebut. Secara ringkas, penelitian ini telah berhasil mengembangkan sebuah lembar kerja siswa untuk siswa jurusan Jasa Boga sebagai materi pelengkap untuk memenuhi kebutuhan mereka akan materi khusus berbahasa Inggris.   Kata Kunci : Budaya Lokal, Lembar Kerja Siswa, Jasa Bog

Annual baseflow variations as influenced by climate variability and agricultural land use change in the Missouri River Basin

The Missouri River system has a large water storage capacity, where baseflow plays an important role. Understanding historical baseflow characteristics with respect to climate and land use impacts is essential for effective planning and management of water resources in the Missouri River Basin (MORB). This study evaluated statistical trends in baseflow and precipitation for 99 MORB minimally disturbed watersheds during 1950–2014. Elasticity of baseflow to climate variability and agricultural land use change were quantified for the 99 studied watersheds. Baseflow was derived from daily streamflow records with a recursive digital filter method. The results showed that baseflow varied between 38 and 80% (0 and 331 mm/year) of total streamflow with an average of 60%, indicating that more than half of streamflow in the MORB is derived from baseflow. The trend analysis revealed that precipitation increased during the study period in 78 out of 99 watersheds, leading to 1–3.9% noticeable increase in baseflow for 68 of 99 watersheds. Although the changes in baseflow obtained in this study were a result of the combined effects of climate and land use change across the basin, upward trends in baseflow generally coincide with increased precipitation and agricultural land use trends in the basin. Agricultural land use increase mostly led to a 0–5.7% decrease in annual baseflow in the basin, except toward east of the basin where baseflow mostly increased with agricultural land use increase (0.1–2.0%). In general, a 1% increase in precipitation and a 1% increase in agricultural land use resulted in 1.5% increase and 0.2% decrease in baseflow, respectively, during the study period. These results are entirely dependent on the quality of data used; however, they provide useful insight into the relative influence of climate and land use change on baseflow conditions in the Great Plains region of the USA