A Study on the Design Thinking and Drawing of the Concept Development

This study was aim to examine the cognitive progress of graphic design involved in concept development. The results show that: (1) Cognitive progress can be observed from the design thinking and drawing patterns that emerge in designing works. The thinking activity was distinguished into general, experiential and evaluating thoughts, whereas drawing activity was categorized into graphic drawing and word description. (2) On the whole, more time was spent on general thought, less on experiential thought, and the least on evaluating thought. (3) There were three stages of concept development. General thought occurs more frequent in the initial stage while picture sketch takes place more frequent in the middle and final stages. In the other words, the process of the concept development was filled up via the concepts formed at first stage and translated into idea sketches at the next two stages

Effects of different ceramic and dentin thicknesses on the temperature rise during photocuring

AbstractBackground/purposeThe aims of this investigation were to describe the effect of different ceramic and remaining dentin thicknesses on substrate temperature during photocuring, and investigate whether the temperature increased by >5.5°C for different dentin/ceramic combinations.Materials and methodsThree groups of dentin thicknesses of 1.0 (D1.0), 1.5 (D1.5), and 2.0 mm (D2.0), and three groups of ceramic thicknesses of 1.5 (C1.5), 2.5 (C2.5), and 3.5 mm (C3.5) were examined. Temperature changes and the maximum temperature were observed under a high-intensity halogen light (QTH-Atralis 10 ECS program at 1200mW/cm2 for 30 seconds, Ivoclar Vivadent AG, Schaan, Liechtenstein). Four groups, D1.0–C1.5 (+11°C), D1.5–C1.5 (+7.2°C), D1.0–C2.5 (+6.7°C), and D2–0C1.5 (+5.8°C), demonstrated temperature changes of >5.5°C.Results and ConclusionsA statistical analysis showed that separate individual thicknesses and combinations of dentin and ceramic had significant effects on temperature changes (P<0.01). It was observed that the ceramic exhibited a smaller temperature shielding effect than dentin. Clinically, it would be optimal to preserve the dentin to avoid damaging pulp tissues. Where there is insufficient overall thickness (≤3.5mm), continuous high-energy output photocuring should be avoided to protect pulp tissues from thermal injury

Prognosis of Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma in the Elderly is Worse than in Younger Individuals–Experience of a Medical Institute

SummaryPurposeWe aimed to evaluate outcomes of the elderly (>65 years) by comparing with younger (<40 years) patients after treatments for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC).Materials and methodsWe retrospectively obtained clinical data from charts for 23 older and 21 younger patients in whom NPC was diagnosed and who underwent curative managements during 2007 and 2011. Occurrence of local recurrence, distant metastasis, and death from any cause were recorded as endpoints. Cox proportional hazards regression was applied to determine age effects on survival risks after adjusting for the potential confounders.ResultsOlder patients more commonly received a diagnosis of chronic diseases than the younger patients (56.5% versus 23.8%, p = 0.036), whereas they were less likely to have received intensive treatments for NPC. After adjusting for medical history and neoadjuvant chemotherapy, older age was the only significant predictor in the study cohort for overall survival and progression-free survival. The adjusted hazard ratio (HR) for death from all causes in older patients was 6.3 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.3–30.2), and the adjusted HR for disease progression in older patients was 10.9 (95% CI = 2.3–50.6).ConclusionAging was the only independent prognostic risk factor in this study cohort. Medical history and treatment variations could not fully explain the difference in prognosis. Our results strengthen the need to ameliorate toxicities and improve supportive care for older patients with a diagnosis of NPC

An acoustic detection dataset of birds (Aves) in montane forests using a deep learning approach

Long-term monitoring is needed to understand the statuses and trends of wildlife communities in montane forests, such as those in Yushan National Park (YSNP), Taiwan. Integrating passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) with an automated sound identifier, a long-term biodiversity monitoring project containing six PAM stations, was launched in YSNP in January 2020 and is currently ongoing. SILIC, an automated wildlife sound identification model, was used to extract sounds and species information from the recordings collected. Animal vocal activity can reflect their breeding status, behaviour, population, movement and distribution, which may be affected by factors, such as habitat loss, climate change and human activity. This massive amount of wildlife vocalisation dataset can provide essential information for the National Park's headquarters on resource management and decision-making. It can also be valuable for those studying the effects of climate change on animal distribution and behaviour at a regional or global scale.To our best knowledge, this is the first open-access dataset with species occurrence data extracted from sounds in soundscape recordings by artificial intelligence. We obtained seven bird species for the first release, with more bird species and other taxa, such as mammals and frogs, to be updated annually. Raw recordings containing over 1.7 million one-minute recordings collected between the years 2020 and 2021 were analysed and SILIC identified 6,243,820 vocalisations of seven bird species in 439,275 recordings. The automatic detection had a precision of 0.95 and the recall ranged from 0.48 to 0.80. In terms of the balance between precision and recall, we prioritised increasing precision over recall in order to minimise false positive detections. In this dataset, we summarised the count of vocalisations detected per sound class per recording which resulted in 802,670 occurrence records. Unlike data from traditional human observation methods, the number of observations in the Darwin Core &quot;organismQuantity&quot; column refers to the number of vocalisations detected for a specific bird species and cannot be directly linked to the number of individuals.We expect our dataset will be able to help fill the data gaps of fine-scale avian temporal activity patterns in montane forests and contribute to studies concerning the impacts of climate change on montane forest ecosystems on regional or global scales

Plasmonic mode converter for controlling optical impedance and nanoscale light-matter interaction

To enable multiple functions of plasmonic nanocircuits, it is of key importance to control the propagation properties and the modal distribution of the guided optical modes such that their impedance matches to that of nearby quantum systems and desired light-matter interaction can be achieved. Here, we present efficient mode converters for manipulating guided modes on a plasmonic two-wire transmission line. The mode conversion is achieved through varying the path length, wire cross section and the surrounding index of refraction. Instead of pure optical interference, strong near-field coupling of surface plasmons results in great momentum splitting and modal profile variation. We theoretically demonstrate control over nanoantenna radiation and discuss the possibility to enhance nanoscale light-matter interaction. The proposed converter may find applications in surface plasmon amplification, index sensing and enhanced nanoscale spectroscopy.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure

Comparison and Identification of Estrogen-Receptor Related Gene Expression Profiles in Breast Cancer of Different Ethnic Origins

The interactions between genetic variants in estrogen receptor (ER) have been identified to be associated with an increased risk of breast cancer. Available evidence indicates that genetic variance within a population plays a crucial role in the occurrence of breast cancer. Thus, the comparison and identification of ER-related gene expression profiles in breast cancer of different ethnic origins could be useful for the development of genetic variant cancer therapy. In this study, we performed microarray experiment to measure the gene expression profiles of 59 Taiwanese breast cancer patients; and through comparative bioinformatics analysis against published U.K. datasets, we revealed estrogen-receptor (ER) related gene expression between Taiwanese and British patients. In addition, SNP databases and statistical analysis were used to elucidate the SNPs associated with ER status. Our microarray results indicate that the expression pattern of the 65 genes in ER+ patients was dissimilar from that of the ER- patients. Seventeen mutually exclusive genes in ER-related breast cancer of the two populations with more than one statistically significant SNP in genotype and allele frequency were identified. These 17 genes and their related SNPs may be important in population-specific ER regulation of breast cancer. This study provides a global and feasible approach to study population-unique SNPs in breast cancer of different ethnic origins

Major Functional Transcriptome of an Inferred Center Regulator of an ER(−) Breast Cancer Model System

We aimed to find clinically relevant gene activities ruled by the signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) proteins in an ER(−) breast cancer population via network approach. STAT3 is negatively associated with both lymph nodal category and stage. MYC is a component of STAT3 network. MYC and STAT3 may co-regulate gene expressions for Warburg effect, stem cell like phenotype, cell proliferation and angiogenesis. We identified a STAT3 network in silico showing its ability in predicting its target gene expressions primarily for specific tumor subtype, tumor progression, treatment options and prognostic features. The aberrant expressions of MYC and STAT3 are enriched in triple negatives (TN). They promote histological grade, vascularity, metastasis and tumor anti-apoptotic activities. VEGFA, STAT3, FOXM1 and METAP2 are druggable targets. High levels of METAP2, MMP7, IGF2 and IGF2R are unfavorable prognostic factors. STAT3 is an inferred center regulator at early cancer development predominantly in TN