Psychometric Testing of the Walker\u27s Feelings and Thoughts About Weight Scale in Taiwan

Background: The majority of women do not return to their pre-pregnant weight after six weeks postpartum in Taiwan. Excessive postpartum weight retention or gain can lead to long-term obesity and increase a woman\u27s risk of major health problems. Trends among Taiwanese women reveal an increasing prevalence of obesity. Limiting postpartum weight retention is important for preventing long-term obesity development. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to examine predictors of postpartum weight gain among Taiwanese women using the modified Thriving Model (Walker & Kim, 2002) as the guiding conceptual framework and to examine the psychometric properties of a Chinese Version of the Feelings and Thoughts About Weight (FATAW) scale. Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive design and a convenience sample of postpartum women three-to-nine month postpartum were recruited over a 6-month period (September 2005 through February 2006). Setting: Waiting room of the well baby clinic which routinely takes place six days a week at a large Maternity Center in the Taipei metropolitan area, northern Taiwan. Human subjects approval was obtained through the University of San Diego as well as Institutional Review Boards associated with the Maternity Center. Data analysis: Descriptive statistics, correlations and factor analysis were used. Results: Findings indicated that CFATAW was a valid and reliable scale to measure postpartum women\u27s feelings and thoughts about weight in Taiwan. The Cronbach\u27s alpha reliability coefficient for the total scale was 0.89. Women with BMI equal or greater than 24.00 and weight retention in this study had a significantly higher relative risk of reporting higher level of weight-related distress in the early months after childbirth in Taiwan. Conclusions: The results of this study show that the measurement of weight-related feelings and thoughts in the Chinese version is content valid and the instrument is internally consistent and construct valid for use in Taiwan. Implications for nursing: The Chinese version of FATAW scale in this study contributed to understanding of feelings and thoughts about weight among postpartum women in Taiwan that affect factors related to postpartum weight retention. This study also provided initial validate and reliable instrument for further research on weight-related distress among Taiwanese postpartum women

Focusing RKKY interaction by graphene P-N junction

The carrier-mediated RKKY interaction between local spins plays an important role for the application of magnetically doped graphene in spintronics and quantum computation. Previous studies largely concentrate on the influence of electronic states of uniform systems on the RKKY interaction. Here we reveal a very different way to manipulate the RKKY interaction by showing that the anomalous focusing - a well-known electron optics phenomenon in graphene P-N junctions - can be utilized to refocus the massless Dirac electrons emanating from one local spin to the other local spin. This gives rise to rich spatial interference patterns and symmetry-protected non-oscillatory RKKY interaction with a strongly enhanced magnitude. It may provide a new way to engineer the long-range spin-spin interaction in graphene.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

Efficient tree-listing algorithm

Electronics LettersThe article of record may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1049/el:19700192An algorithm, based on the T-triangle method, is given for the generation of all the trees in a nonoriented connected graph. The efficiency of the algorithm is verified by computer results

A Note on Entanglement Entropy for Primary Fermion Fields in JT Gravity

In this paper we analyse and discuss 2D Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity coupled to primary fermion fields in asymptotically anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetimes. We get a particular solution of the massless Dirac field outside the extremal black hole horizon and find the solution for the dilaton in JT gravity. Two dimensional JT gravity spacetime is conformally flat, we calculate the two point correlators of primary fermion fields under the Weyl transformations. The key point of this work is to present a standard technique which is called resolvent rather than CFT methods. We redefine the fields in terms of the conformal factor as the fermion fields, and we use the resolvent technique to derive the renormalized entanglement entropy for massless Dirac fields in JT gravity.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures; improvements to presentation, new content added in appendix to comment about the correlator trace formula of primary fermion fields, published version in CP

Collimated directional emission from a peanut-shaped microresonator

Collimated directional emission is essentially required an asymmetric resonant cavity. In this paper, we theoretically investigate a type of peanut-shaped microcavity which can support highly directional emission with the emission divergence as small as 2.5o. The mechanism of the collimated emission is explained with the short-term ray trajectory and the intuitive lens model in detail. Wave simulation also confirms these results. This extremely narrow divergence of the emission holds a great potential in highly collimated lasing from on-chip microcavities

A gene-signature progression approach to identifying candidate small-molecule cancer therapeutics with connectivity mapping

Background: Gene expression connectivity mapping has gained much popularity recently with a number of successful applications in biomedical research testifying its utility and promise. Previously methodological research in connectivity mapping mainly focused on two of the key components in the framework, namely, the reference gene expression profiles and the connectivity mapping algorithms. The other key component in this framework, the query gene signature, has been left to users to construct without much consensus on how this should be done, albeit it has been an issue most relevant to end users. As a key input to the connectivity mapping process, gene signature is crucially important in returning biologically meaningful and relevant results. This paper intends to formulate a standardized procedure for constructing high quality gene signatures from a user’s perspective.Results: We describe a two-stage process for making quality gene signatures using gene expression data as initial inputs. First, a differential gene expression analysis comparing two distinct biological states; only the genes that have passed stringent statistical criteria are considered in the second stage of the process, which involves ranking genes based on statistical as well as biological significance. We introduce a “gene signature progression” method as a standard procedure in connectivity mapping. Starting from the highest ranked gene, we progressively determine the minimum length of the gene signature that allows connections to the reference profiles (drugs) being established with a preset target false discovery rate. We use a lung cancer dataset and a breast cancer dataset as two case studies to demonstrate how this standardized procedure works, and we show that highly relevant and interesting biological connections are returned. Of particular note is gefitinib, identified as among the candidate therapeutics in our lung cancer case study. Our gene signature was based on gene expression data from Taiwan female non-smoker lung cancer patients, while there is evidence from independent studies that gefitinib is highly effective in treating women, non-smoker or former light smoker, advanced non-small cell lung cancer patients of Asian origin.Conclusions: In summary, we introduced a gene signature progression method into connectivity mapping, which enables a standardized procedure for constructing high quality gene signatures. This progression method is particularly useful when the number of differentially expressed genes identified is large, and when there is a need to prioritize them to be included in the query signature. The results from two case studies demonstrate that the approach we have developed is capable of obtaining pertinent candidate drugs with high precision