Exploring the "energy-saving personality traits" in the office and household situation: An empirical study

Behavior-driven energy conservation has been a promising strategy for reducing building energy consumption as well as carbon emissions. With the intention of revealing the impacts of an individual’s personality basis on energy conservation behavioral attitudes and intentions in households and offices, the present study proposes and conducts an experiment in Xi’an, China with two groups for the investigation of such attitudes towards household energy-saving behavior (HESB) and office energy-saving behavior (OESB), respectively. The research adopts structural equation modeling for experiment data analysis. The analysis results suggest that the two personality traits, Agreeableness and Neuroticism, are significantly related to both HESB and OESB attitudes. Especially, agreeable people tend to present stronger energy-saving attitudes, while individuals with higher Neuroticism are less likely to do so. The results indicate that the impacts of these two traits on energy-saving attitude are found to be less influenced by different environment settings. Further, the results find that Extraversion positively influences energy-saving attitude in the office environment, while Openness only significantly works in the household environment. It is hoped that the findings of the present study can provide informative references to energy-saving intervention design as well as further studies on the spillover of pro-environmental behaviors.</jats:p

Developing an EEG-based on-line closed-loop lapse detection and mitigation system

© 2014 Wang, Huang, Wei, Huang, Ko, Lin, Cheng and Jung. In America, 60% of adults reported that they have driven a motor vehicle while feeling drowsy, and at least 15-20% of fatal car accidents are fatigue-related. This study translates previous laboratory-oriented neurophysiological research to design, develop, and test an On-line Closed-loop Lapse Detection and Mitigation (OCLDM) System featuring a mobile wireless dry-sensor EEG headgear and a cell-phone based real-time EEG processing platform. Eleven subjects participated in an event-related lane-keeping task, in which they were instructed to manipulate a randomly deviated, fixed-speed cruising car on a 4-lane highway. This was simulated in a 1st person view with an 8-screen and 8-projector immersive virtual-reality environment. When the subjects experienced lapses or failed to respond to events during the experiment, auditory warning was delivered to rectify the performance decrements. However, the arousing auditory signals were not always effective. The EEG spectra exhibited statistically significant differences between effective and ineffective arousing signals, suggesting that EEG spectra could be used as a countermeasure of the efficacy of arousing signals. In this on-line pilot study, the proposed OCLDM System was able to continuously detect EEG signatures of fatigue, deliver arousing warning to subjects suffering momentary cognitive lapses, and assess the efficacy of the warning in near real-time to rectify cognitive lapses. The on-line testing results of the OCLDM System validated the efficacy of the arousing signals in improving subjects' response times to the subsequent lane-departure events. This study may lead to a practical on-line lapse detection and mitigation system in real-world environments

Transfer learning with large-scale data in brain-computer interfaces

© 2016 IEEE. Human variability in electroencephalogram (EEG) poses significant challenges for developing practical real-world applications of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). The intuitive solution of collecting sufficient user-specific training/calibration data can be very labor-intensive and time-consuming, hindering the practicability of BCIs. To address this problem, transfer learning (TL), which leverages existing data from other sessions or subjects, has recently been adopted by the BCI community to build a BCI for a new user with limited calibration data. However, current TL approaches still require training/calibration data from each of conditions, which might be difficult or expensive to obtain. This study proposed a novel TL framework that could nearly eliminate requirement of subject-specific calibration data by leveraging large-scale data from other subjects. The efficacy of this method was validated in a passive BCI that was designed to detect neurocognitive lapses during driving. With the help of large-scale data, the proposed TL approach outperformed the within-subject approach while considerably reducing the amount of calibration data required for each individual (∼1.5 min of data from each individual as opposed to a 90 min pilot session used in a standard within-subject approach). This demonstration might considerably facilitate the real-world applications of BCIs

Hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathy type 1 (HSANI) caused by a novel mutation in SPTLC2.

To describe the clinical and neurophysiologic phenotype of a family with hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathy type 1 (HSANI) due to a novel mutation in SPTLC2 and to characterize the biochemical properties of this mutation

Impact of Inpatient Care in Emergency Department on Outcomes: A Quasi-Experimental Cohort Study

BACKGROUND: Hospitals around the world are faced with the issue of boarders in emergency department (ED), patients marked for admission but with no available inpatient bed. Boarder status is known to be associated with delayed inpatient care and suboptimal outcomes. A new care delivery system was developed in our institution where boarders received full inpatient care from a designated medical team, acute medical team (AMT), while still residing at ED. The current study examines the impact of this AMT intervention on patient outcomes. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective quasi-experimental cohort study to analyze outcomes between the AMT intervention and conventional care in a 1250-bed acute care tertiary academic hospital in Singapore. Study participants included patients who received care from the AMT, a matched cohort of patients admitted directly to inpatient wards (non-AMT) and a sample of patients prior to the intervention (pre-AMT group). Primary outcomes were length of hospital stay (LOS), early discharges (within 24 h) and bed placement. Secondary outcomes included unplanned readmissions within 3 months, and patient’s bill size. χ2- and Mann-Whitney U tests were used to test for differences between the cohorts on dichotomous and continuous variables respectively. RESULTS: The sample comprised of 2279 patients (1092 in AMT, 1027 in non-AMT, and 160 in pre-AMT groups). Higher rates of early discharge (without significant differences in the readmission rates) and shorter LOS were noted for the AMT patients. They were also more likely to be admitted into a ward allocated to their discipline and had lower bill size compared to non AMT patients. CONCLUSIONS: The AMT intervention improved patient outcomes and resource utilization. This model was noted to be sustainable and provides a potential solution for hospitals’ ED boarders who face a gap in inpatient care during their crucial first few hours of admissions while waiting for an inpatient bed

Structural and bonding transformation of Al0.67CrCoCuFeNi high-entropy alloys during quenching

Structural and bonding transformation of the Al0.67CrCoFeNi high-entropy alloys (HEA) during&nbsp;quenching&nbsp;is investigated by molecular dynamics simulations. At a high cooling rate, some short-ranged ordered clusters, such as FCC, HCP and BCC&nbsp;crystalline&nbsp;clusters are already present in the almost amorphous HEAs. When the cooling rate decreases, the atoms become packed more orderly and ultimately form a nano-polycrystalline structure dominated by FCC structures. The BCC structures appear only as an intermediate state acting on the course of&nbsp;crystallization, while the HCP structure can be viewed as the precursor of the malposed FCC structure due to the identical first neighbor distances. In liquid HEAs, the low-symmetry and low-coordination bond pairs, either transform to high-symmetry and high-coordination 1551 bond pairs, or transform to 1(5,4)41 bond pairs for FCC structure and 1661 bond pairs for an HCP structure, depending on the cooling rates. This study will contribute to a better understanding of the essential phase change in HEAs.</p

Ionization Efficiency in the Dayside Martian Upper Atmosphere

Combining the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution measurements of neutral atmospheric density, solar EUV/X-ray flux, and differential photoelectron intensity made during 240 nominal orbits, we calculate the ionization efficiency, defined as the ratio of the secondary (photoelectron impact) ionization rate to the primary (photon impact) ionization rate, in the dayside Martian upper atmosphere under a range of solar illumination conditions. Both the CO₂ and O ionization efficiencies tend to be constant from 160 km up to 250 km, with respective median values of 0.19 ± 0.03 and 0.27 ± 0.04. These values are useful for fast calculation of the ionization rate in the dayside Martian upper atmosphere, without the need to construct photoelectron transport models. No substantial diurnal and solar cycle variations can be identified, except for a marginal trend of reduced ionization efficiency approaching the terminator. These observations are favorably interpreted by a simple scenario with ionization efficiencies, as a first approximation, determined by a comparison between relevant cross sections. Our analysis further reveals a connection between regions with strong crustal magnetic fields and regions with high ionization efficiencies, which are likely indicative of more efficient vertical transport of photoelectrons near magnetic anomalies

Polyclonal rabbit anti-murine plasmacytoma cell globulins induce myeloma cells apoptosis and inhibit tumour growth in mice

Multiple myelomas (MMs) are etiologically heterogeneous and there are limited treatment options; indeed, current monoclonal antibody therapies have had limited success, so more effective antibodies are urgently needed. Polyclonal antibodies are a possible alternative because they target multiple antigens simultaneously. In this study, we produced polyclonal rabbit anti-murine plasmacytoma cell immunoglobulin (PAb) by immunizing rabbits with the murine plasmacytoma cell line MPC-11. The isolated PAb bound to plasma surface antigens in several MM cell lines, inhibited their proliferation as revealed by MTT assay, and induce apoptosis as indicated by flow cytometry, microscopic observation of apoptotic changes in morphology, and DNA fragmentation on agarose gels. The cytotoxicity of PAb on MPC-11 cell lines was both dose-dependent and time-dependent; PAb exerted a 50% inhibitory effect on MPC-11 cell viability at a concentration of 200 µg/ml in 48 h. Flow cytometry demonstrated that PAb treatment significantly increased the number of apoptotic cells (48.1%) compared with control IgG (8.3%). Apoptosis triggered by PAb was confirmed by activation of caspase-3, -8, and -9. Serial intravenous or intraperitoneal injections of PAb inhibited tumour growth and prolonged survival in mice bearing murine plasmacytoma, while TUNEL assay demonstrated that PAb induced statistically significant apoptosis (P < 0.05) compared to control treatments. We conclude that PAb is an effective agent for in vitro and in vivo induction of apoptosis in multiple myeloma and that exploratory clinical trials may be warranted