Waist Circumference predicting Cardiovascular Disease in Korean Men and Women

Objective: Obesity and cardiovascular disease (CVD) are closely related and have become increasingly prevalent in Korea. Asians are more prone to obesity-related co-morbidities than Caucasians, even at lower body mass index (BMI) and/or smaller waist circumference (WC) values. Nevertheless, little is known regarding the association of WC with the risk of CVD in non-Caucasian populations. The authors conducted a prospective cohort study of WC and the risk of CVD in the Korean Heart Study.Methods: We examined the association of WC to CVD incidence among 53,026 Korean adults (30,152 men, 22,874 women) with no history of CVD and/or cancer. During a mean follow-up of 8.6 years, 2,722 incident cases of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) including 1,383 cases of ischemic heart disease (IHD) and 1,012 cases of stroke were documented. Results: Average WC at baseline was 84.0±8.2 cm in men and 75.2±8.9 cm in women. After adjustment for age and BMI, WC was significantly associated with cardiovascular risk factors (P <.001). In men, a WC of ≥91 cm was associated with an ASCVD hazard ratio (HR) of 1.62 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.25, 2.10) and an IHD HR of 1.70 (95% CI: 1.19, 2.42) in comparison with a WC of <78 cm even after further adjustment for BMI and traditional risk factors (P for trend = 0.0118, 0.0139 respectively). In women, the progressive associations of WC with ASCVD, IHD and stroke were observed. These associations were however attenuated after further adjustment for BMI and traditional risk factors. The multivariable HRs for ASCVD, IHD, and stroke increased with higher WC in both men and women. Conclusions: Central obesity significantly and independently contributes to cardiovascular outcomes in Korean men and women

Data Epistemologies / Surveillance and Uncertainty

Data Epistemologies studies the changing ways in which ‘knowledge’ is defined, promised, problematised, legitimated vis-á-vis the advent of digital, ‘big’ data surveillance technologies in early twenty-first century America. As part of the period’s fascination with ‘new’ media and ‘big’ data, such technologies intersect ambitious claims to better knowledge with a problematisation of uncertainty. This entanglement, I argue, results in contextual reconfigurations of what ‘counts’ as knowledge and who (or what) is granted authority to produce it – whether it involves proving that indiscriminate domestic surveillance prevents terrorist attacks, to arguing that machinic sensors can know us better than we can ever know ourselves. The present work focuses on two empirical cases. The first is the ‘Snowden Affair’ (2013-Present): the public controversy unleashed through the leakage of vast quantities of secret material on the electronic surveillance practices of the U.S. government. The second is the ‘Quantified Self’ (2007-Present), a name which describes both an international community of experimenters and the wider industry built up around the use of data-driven surveillance technology for self-tracking every possible aspect of the individual ‘self’. By triangulating media coverage, connoisseur communities, advertising discourse and leaked material, I examine how surveillance technologies were presented for public debate and speculation. This dissertation is thus a critical diagnosis of the contemporary faith in ‘raw’ data, sensing machines and algorithmic decision-making, and of their public promotion as the next great leap towards objective knowledge. Surveillance is not only a means of totalitarian control or a technology for objective knowledge, but a collective fantasy that seeks to mobilise public support for new epistemic systems. Surveillance, as part of a broader enthusiasm for ‘data-driven’ societies, extends the old modern project whereby the human subject – its habits, its affects, its actions – become the ingredient, the raw material, the object, the target, for the production of truths and judgments about them by things other than themselves

Data’s Intimacy: Machinic Sensibility and the Quantified Self

Today, machines observe, record, sense the world – not just for us, but sometimes instead of us (in our stead), and even indifferently to us humans. And yet, we remain human. Correlationism may not be up to a comprehensive ontology, but the ways in which we encounter, and struggle to make some kind of sense of, machinic sensibility matters. The nature of that encounter is not instrumentality, or even McLuhanian extension, but a full-blown ‘relationship’ where the terms by which machines ‘experience’ the world, and communicate with each other, parametrises the conditions for our own experience. This essay will play out one such relationship currently in the making: the boom in self-tracking technologies, and the attendant promise of data’s intimacy. This essay proceeds in three sections, all of which draw on a larger research project into self-tracking and contemporary data epistemologies. It thus leverages observations from close reading of self-tracking’s publicisation in the mass media between 2007 and 2016; analysis of over fifty self-tracking products, some of it through self-experimentation; and interviews and ethnographic observation, primarily of the ‘Quantified Self’ connoisseur community. The first section examines the dominant public presentations of self-tracking in early twenty-first century discourse. This discourse embraces a vision of automated and intimate self-surveillance, which is then promised to deliver superior control and objective knowledge over the self. Next, I link these promises to the recent theoretical turns towards the agency of objects and the autonomous sensory capacities of new media to consider the implications of such theories – and the technological shifts they address – for the phenomenology of the new media subject. Finally, I return to self-tracking discourse to consider its own idealisation of such a subject – what I call ‘data-sense’. I conclude by calling for a more explicit public and intellectual debate around the relationships we forge with new technologies, and the consequences they have for who – and what – is given which kinds of authority to speak the truth of the ‘self’

User Experience in Fashion Brand Pages in Social Networking Sites: Values and Affective Experience of Information Interaction

To enhance a current understanding about brand pages in SNS, this study focuses on user experiences during information interactions in brand pages in SNS and investigates how different values of information interactions in brand pages influence affective experiences, which in turn affect users\u27 experiential states (satisfaction, engagement, cognitive elaboration) and thus their loyalty intention toward brand pages. Four facets of values of interest include two instrumental values (perceived control and usefulness) and two non-instrumental values (perceived enjoyment and connectedness). Data were obtained from 290 adult Koreans who followed fashion brand SNS pages using a self-administered online survey. Our results indicate that users\u27 affective experience during information interaction plays a key role in generating positive user experiences with brand pages in SNS. Specifically, affective experience enhances satisfaction, engaging experience, and cognitive elaboration, thereby increasing loyalty intentions toward the brand page. Additionally, perceived controllability, usefulness, and enjoyment create affective experience

Alpha-tocopherol exerts protective function against the mucotoxicity of particulate matter in amphibian and human goblet cells

Exposure to particulate matter (PM) in ambient air is known to increase the risk of cardiovascular disorders and mortality. The cytotoxicity of PM is mainly due to the abnormal increase of reactive oxygen species (ROS), which damage cellular components such as DNA, RNA, and proteins. The correlation between PM exposure and human disorders, including mortality, is based on long-term exposure. In this study we have investigated acute responses of mucus-secreting goblet cells upon exposure to PM derived from a heavy diesel engine. To this end, we employed the mucociliary epithelium of amphibian embryos and human Calu-3 cells to examine PM mucotoxicity. Our data suggest that acute exposure to PM significantly impairs mucus secretion and results in the accumulation of mucus vesicles in the cytoplasm of goblet cells. RNA-seq analysis revealed that acute responses to PM exposure significantly altered gene expression patterns; however, known regulators of mucus production and the secretory pathway were not significantly altered. Interestingly, pretreatment with alpha-tocopherol nearly recovered the hyposecretion of mucus from both amphibian and human goblet cells. We believe this study demonstrates the mucotoxicity of PM and the protective function of alpha-tocopherol on mucotoxicity caused by acute PM exposure from heavy diesel engines