The relationship between mindfulness and suboptimal health status: a chain/serial mediation model

BackgroundSuboptimal health status (SHS) represents a third state between health and disease and often progresses into chronic conditions, negatively impacting an individual’s well-being. Studies have shown that mindfulness has a beneficial effect on various SHS symptoms. This study aims to explore the influence of mindfulness on SHS and its underlying mechanisms, with a particular focus on examining the mediating roles of stress and social support.MethodsA total of 173 healthy Chinese college or graduate students, with an average age of 21.85 years, participated in this study. Measurements were taken using the Five Factor Mindfulness Questionnaire, the Sub-Health Measurement Scale, the Perceived Stress Scale, and a self-constructed scale that included demographic information. The PROCESS plugin for SPSS was used to assess mediating effects.ResultsSignificant correlations were found among SHS, social support, mindfulness, and perceived stress (|r| = 0.38–0.85, p < 0.01). Specifically, mindfulness showed a significant positive correlation with SHS and social support (r = 0.38–0.77), while perceived stress was significantly negatively correlated with mindfulness, social support, and SHS (|r| = 0.45–0.85). Perceived social support was positively associated with SHS (r = 0.65). Furthermore, social support and perceived stress partially mediated the influence of mindfulness on SHS. Additionally, a sequential mediation effect of perceived social support and stress in the relationship between mindfulness and SHS was supported.ConclusionThe cultivation of trait mindfulness may be advantageous for individuals’ sub-health. Perceived social support and perceived stress are important underlying mechanisms contributing to this effect

Testing and verification of neural-network-based safety-critical control software: A systematic literature review

Context: Neural Network (NN) algorithms have been successfully adopted in a number of Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems (SCCPSs). Testing and Verification (T&V) of NN-based control software in safety-critical domains are gaining interest and attention from both software engineering and safety engineering researchers and practitioners. Objective: With the increase in studies on the T&V of NN-based control software in safety-critical domains, it is important to systematically review the state-of-the-art T&V methodologies, to classify approaches and tools that are invented, and to identify challenges and gaps for future studies. Method: We retrieved 950 papers on the T&V of NN-based Safety-Critical Control Software (SCCS). To reach our result, we filtered 83 primary papers published between 2001 and 2018, applied the thematic analysis approach for analyzing the data extracted from the selected papers, presented the classification of approaches, and identified challenges. Conclusion: The approaches were categorized into five high-order themes: assuring robustness of NNs, assuring safety properties of NN-based control software, improving the failure resilience of NNs, measuring and ensuring test completeness, and improving the interpretability of NNs. From the industry perspective, improving the interpretability of NNs is a crucial need in safety-critical applications. We also investigated nine safety integrity properties within four major safety lifecycle phases to investigate the achievement level of T&V goals in IEC 61508-3. Results show that correctness, completeness, freedom from intrinsic faults, and fault tolerance have drawn most attention from the research community. However, little effort has been invested in achieving repeatability; no reviewed study focused on precisely defined testing configuration or on defense against common cause failure.Comment: This paper had been submitted to Journal of Information and Software Technology on April 20, 2019,Revised 5 December 2019, Accepted 6 March 2020, Available online 7 March 202

Self adaptive global-local feature enhancement for radiology report generation

Automated radiology report generation aims at automatically generating a detailed description of medical images, which can greatly alleviate the workload of radiologists and provide better medical services to remote areas. Most existing works pay attention to the holistic impression of medical images, failing to utilize important anatomy information. However, in actual clinical practice, radiologists usually locate important anatomical structures, and then look for signs of abnormalities in certain structures and reason the underlying disease. In this paper, we propose a novel framework AGFNet to dynamically fuse the global and anatomy region feature to generate multi-grained radiology report. Firstly, we extract important anatomy region features and global features of input Chest X-ray (CXR). Then, with the region features and the global features as input, our proposed self-adaptive fusion gate module could dynamically fuse multi-granularity information. Finally, the captioning generator generates the radiology reports through multi-granularity features. Experiment results illustrate that our model achieved the state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets including the IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR. Further analyses also prove that our model is able to leverage the multi-grained information from radiology images and texts so as to help generate more accurate reports

The role of TRIM family in metabolic associated fatty liver disease

Metabolic associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD) ranks among the most prevalent chronic liver conditions globally. At present, the mechanism of MAFLD has not been fully elucidated. Tripartite motif (TRIM) protein is a kind of protein with E3 ubiquitin ligase activity, which participates in highly diversified cell activities and processes. It not only plays an important role in innate immunity, but also participates in liver steatosis, insulin resistance and other processes. In this review, we focused on the role of TRIM family in metabolic associated fatty liver disease. We also introduced the structure and functions of TRIM proteins. We summarized the TRIM family’s regulation involved in the occurrence and development of metabolic associated fatty liver disease, as well as insulin resistance. We deeply discussed the potential of TRIM proteins as targets for the treatment of metabolic associated fatty liver disease

Revisit security in the era of DevOps : An evidence-based inquiry into DevSecOps industry

By adopting agile and lean practices, DevOps aims to achieve rapid value delivery by speeding up development and deployment cycles, which however lead to more security concerns that cannot be fully addressed by an isolated security role only in the final stage of development. DevSecOps promotes security as a shared responsibility integrated into the DevOps process that seamlessly intertwines development, operations, and security from the start throughout to the end of cycles. While some companies have already begun to embrace this new strategy, both industry and academia are still seeking a common understanding of the DevSecOps movement. The goal of this study is to report the state-of-the-practice of DevSecOps, including the impact of DevOps on security, practitioners' understanding of DevSecOps, and the practices associated with DevSecOps as well as the challenges of implementing DevSecOps. The authors used a mixed-methods approach for this research. The authors carried out a grey literature review on DevSecOps, and surveyed the practitioners of DevSecOps in industry of China. The status quo of DevSecOps in industry is summarized. Three major software security risks are identified with DevOps, where the establishment of DevOps pipeline provides opportunities for security-related activities. The authors classify the interpretations of DevSecOps into three core aspects of DevSecOps capabilities, cultural enablers, and technological enablers. To materialise the interpretations into daily software production activities, the recommended DevSecOps practices from three perspectives—people, process, and technology. Although a preliminary consensus is that DevSecOps is regarded as an extension of DevOps, there is a debate on whether DevSecOps is a superfluous term. While DevSecOps is attracting an increasing attention by industry, it is still in its infancy and more effort needs to be invested to promote it in both research and industry communities