A century of trends in adult human height

Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5-22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3-19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8-144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries

Multi-object tracking using dominant sets

Multi-object tracking is an interesting but challenging task in the field of computer vision. Most previous works based on data association techniques merely take into account the relationship between detection responses in a locally limited temporal domain, which makes them inherently prone to identity switches and difficulties in handling long-term occlusions. In this study, a dominant set clustering based tracker is proposed, which formulates the tracking task as a problem of finding dominant sets in an auxiliary edge weighted graph. Unlike most techniques which are limited in temporal locality (i.e. few frames are considered), the authors utilised a pairwise relationships (in appearance and position) between different detections across the whole temporal span of the video for data association in a global manner. Meanwhile, temporal sliding window technique is utilised to find tracklets and perform further merging on them. The authors' robust tracklet merging step renders the tracker to long term occlusions with more robustness. The authors present results on three different challenging datasets (i.e. PETS2009-S2L1, TUD-standemitte and ETH dataset (sunny day' sequence)), and show significant improvements compared with several state-of-art methods