Exposure factors manual

ABSTRACT: Assessing health risks associated with potential exposure to chemicals from petroleum or petrochemical operations requires the consideration of multiple exposure pathways. These pathways include ingestion of water, food, or soil, inhalation of vapors or airborne particulate, and dermal absorption from contaminated soil, water, or by direct skin contact. To estimate the exposures for each pathway, a number of variables related to exposure, that is, exposure factors, are needed. Some categories of exposure factors include physiologic factors (e.g., body weight), time-activity factors (e.g., time spent at home), and contact rate factors (e.g., soil ingestion rate). This manual is organized by exposure factor category and includes a description of selected exposure factors commonly used in risk assessments, a brief summary, and an evaluation of the current scientific data supporting a recommended point value for each factor, and available information on the known distributions. It is hoped that this information will promote consistency and quality among various risk assessment activities

Eating self-efficacy as predictor of long-term weight loss and obesity-specific quality of life after sleeve gastrectomy: A prospective cohort study

Under embargo until: 15.12.2019Background: A person's confidence to control eating, eating self-efficacy (ESE), has been identified as a target for long-term weight management in nonsurgical weight loss interventions, but has to a limited extent been studied after bariatric surgery. Objective: We investigated the association between ESE, weight loss, and obesity-specific quality of life (QOL) after sleeve gastrectomy (SG). Setting: A single-center longitudinal study. Methods: Data from adult patients were collected before SG, and at mean 16 months (±standard deviation 4 mo) and 55 (±4) months postoperatively. ESE was measured by the Weight Efficacy Lifestyle Questionnaire Short-Form. Multiple regression analyses were performed with excess body mass index loss (%EBMIL) and obesity-specific QOL as dependent variables. Age, sex, and other preoperative values were covariates in all models. Results: Of 114 preoperative patients, 91 (80%) and 84 (74%) were available for follow-up 16 and 55 months after SG, respectively. Mean %EBMIL from baseline to 16 and 55 months was 76% (95% confidence interval: 71.9, 79.6) and 67% (95% confidence interval: 61.9, 72.2), respectively. Preoperative ESE scores improved significantly at both 16 and 55 months (P = .002) but did not predict postoperative %EBMIL or QOL at 55 months (β = −.08, P = .485). Greater change in ESE from 0 to 16 months predicted higher %EBMIL (β = .34, P = .013) at 55 months, and improvements in ESE from 0 to 55 months were significantly associated with higher %EBMIL (β = .46, P = .001) and obesity-specific QOL (β = .50, P < .001) 55 months after SG. Conclusion: Significant improvements in ESE were seen at 16 months, and remained high at 55 months after SG in this cohort. Patients who improved their ESE the most also experienced the highest weight loss and obesity-specific QOL 5 years postoperatively. Future research should address whether enhancement of ESE corresponds to sustained improvements in eating behavior after bariatric surgery.acceptedVersio

Generic 3D Representation via Pose Estimation and Matching

Though a large body of computer vision research has investigated developing generic semantic representations, efforts towards developing a similar representation for 3D has been limited. In this paper, we learn a generic 3D representation through solving a set of foundational proxy 3D tasks: object-centric camera pose estimation and wide baseline feature matching. Our method is based upon the premise that by providing supervision over a set of carefully selected foundational tasks, generalization to novel tasks and abstraction capabilities can be achieved. We empirically show that the internal representation of a multi-task ConvNet trained to solve the above core problems generalizes to novel 3D tasks (e.g., scene layout estimation, object pose estimation, surface normal estimation) without the need for fine-tuning and shows traits of abstraction abilities (e.g., cross-modality pose estimation). In the context of the core supervised tasks, we demonstrate our representation achieves state-of-the-art wide baseline feature matching results without requiring apriori rectification (unlike SIFT and the majority of learned features). We also show 6DOF camera pose estimation given a pair local image patches. The accuracy of both supervised tasks come comparable to humans. Finally, we contribute a large-scale dataset composed of object-centric street view scenes along with point correspondences and camera pose information, and conclude with a discussion on the learned representation and open research questions.Comment: Published in ECCV16. See the project website http://3drepresentation.stanford.edu/ and dataset website https://github.com/amir32002/3D_Street_Vie

Thiazole-induced rigidification in substituted dithieno-tetrathiafulvalene : the effect of planarisation on charge transport properties

Two novel tetrathiafulvalene (TTF) containing compounds 1 and 2 have been synthesised via a four-fold Stille coupling between a tetrabromo-dithienoTTF 5 and stannylated thiophene 6 or thiazole 4. The optical and electrochemical properties of compounds 1 and 2 have been measured by UV-vis spectroscopy and cyclic voltammetry and the results compared with density functional theory (DFT) calculations to confirm the observed properties. Organic field effect transistor (OFET) devices fabricated from 1 and 2 demonstrated that the substitution of thiophene units for thiazoles was found to increase the observed charge transport, which is attributed to induced planarity through S-N interactions of adjacent thiazole nitrogen atoms and TTF sulfur atoms and better packing in the bulk