VR Empathy Training Tool

A person’s resilience to adversity and trauma is developed early on in his or her childhood. When parents display stress in front or neglect emotions of their children consistently, their children will form neural connections between areas of pain and stress. It is important to educate parents to properly handle children’s emotions and also control their own emotions and mindfulness during these interactions. We developed an iOS VR application accompanied by a Google Cardboard and a Mio Alpha fitness watch to record and display the stress level of the parent using his/her heart rate data. The progress of the users can be sent back to researchers for further study and also evaluation. This system allows parents to interact with a VR child to develop empathy, along with training their own emotional intelligence. Users can also view an intense scene of a VR parent displaying negative emotions in the child’s perspective. This system will eventually be used as an educational tool in the Resilient Families Program in San Jose. In the future, more complex interactions can be achieved by adding animation assets, and also increased accuracy in stress sensing by replacing the heart rate monitor with a more accurate biometric system

Temporal RDF(S) Data Storage and Query with HBase

Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a metadata model recommended by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for describing the Web resources. With the arrival of the era of Big Data, very large amounts of RDF data are continuously being created and need to be stored for management. The traditional centralized RDF storage models cannot meet the need of largescale RDF data storage. Meanwhile, the importance of temporal information management and processing has been acknowledged by academia and industry. In this paper, we propose a storage model to store temporal RDF based on HBase. The proposed storage model applies the built-in time mechanism of HBase. Our experiments on LUBM dataset with temporal information added show that our storage model can store large temporal RDF data and obtain good query efficiency

Dietary inflammatory potential mediated gut microbiota and metabolite alterations in Crohn's disease:A fire-new perspective

Background & aims: Pro-inflammatory diet interacting with gut microbiome might trigger for Crohn's disease (CD). We aimed to investigate the relationship between dietary inflammatory potential and microflora/metabolites change and their link with CD. Methods: The dietary inflammatory potential was assessed using a dietary inflammatory index (DII) based on the Food Frequency Questionnaire from 150 new-onset CD patients and 285 healthy controls (HCs). We selected 41 CD patients and 89 HCs who had not received medication for metagenomic and targeted metabolomic sequencing to profile their gut microbial composition as well as fecal and serum metabolites. DII scores were classified into quartiles to investigate associations among different variables. Results: DII scores of CD patients were significantly higher than HCs (0.56 ± 1.20 vs 0.23 ± 1.02, p = 0.017). With adjustment for confounders, a higher DII score was significantly associated with higher risk of CD (OR: 1.420; 95% CI: 1.049, 1.923, p = 0.023). DII score also was positively correlated with disease activity (p = 0.001). Morganella morganii and Veillonella parvula were increased while Coprococcus eutactus was decreased in the pro-inflammatory diets group, as well as in CD. DII-related bacteria were associated with disease activity and inflammatory markers in CD patients. Among the metabolic change, pro-inflammatory diet induced metabolites change were largely involved in amino acid metabolic pathways that were also observed in CD. Conclusions: Pro-inflammatory diet might be associated with increased risk and disease activity of CD. Diet with high DII potentially involves in CD by mediating alterations in gut microbiota and metabolites

Thyroid autoimmunity and adverse pregnancy outcomes: A multiple center retrospective study

BackgroundThe relationship between thyroid autoimmunity (TAI) and adverse pregnancy outcomes is disputable, and their dose-dependent association have not been fully clarified.ObjectiveTo investigate the association and dose-dependent effect of TAI with multiple maternal and fetal-neonatal complications.MethodsThis study is a multi-center retrospective cohort study based on singleton pregnancies of three medical college hospitals from July 2013 to October 2021. The evolution of thyroid function parameters in TAI and not TAI women were described, throughout pregnancy. The prevalences of maternal and fetal-neonatal complications were compared between the TAI and control group. Logistic regression was performed to study the risk effects and dose-dependent effects of thyroid autoantibodies on pregnancy complications, with adjustment of maternal age, BMI, gravidity, TSH concentrations, FT4 concentrations and history of infertility.ResultsA total of 27408 participants were included in final analysis, with 5342 (19.49%) in the TAI group and 22066 (80.51%) in control group. TSH concentrations was higher in TAI women in baseline and remain higher before the third trimester. Positive thyroid autoantibodies were independently associated with higher risk of pregnancy-induced hypertension (OR: 1.215, 95%CI: 1.026-1.439), gestational diabetes mellitus (OR: 1.088, 95%CI: 1.001-1.183), and neonatal admission to NICU (OR: 1.084, 95%CI: 1.004-1.171). Quantitative analysis showed that increasing TPOAb concentration was correlated with higher probability of pregnancy-induced hypertension, and increasing TGAb concentration was positively correlated with pregnancy-induced hypertension, small for gestational age and NICU admission. Both TPOAb and TGAb concentration were negatively associated with neonatal birthweight.ConclusionThyroid autoimmunity is independently associated with pregnancy-induced hypertension, gestational diabetes mellitus, neonatal lower birthweight and admission to NICU. Dose-dependent association were found between TPOAb and pregnancy-induced hypertension, and between TGAb and pregnancy-induced hypertension, small for gestational age and NICU admission

Solutions for Impulsive Fractional Differential Equations via Variational Methods

We investigate the boundary value problems of impulsive fractional order differential equations. First, we obtain the existence of at least one solution by the minimization result of Mawhin and Willem. Then by the variational methods and a very recent critical points theorem of Bonanno and Marano, the existence results of at least triple solutions are established. At last, two examples are offered to demonstrate the application of our main results

Heat Transfer Studies of Arrays of Prolate Particles in Gas-Solid Flows

Numerical study of forced convection heat transfer from arrays of prolate particles is performed using the second-order Immersed Boundary-Lattice Boltzmann Method (IB-LBM). Prolate particle is studied with aspect ratio of 2.5 with solid volume fraction variation from 0.1 to 0.3. For each solid volume fraction, arrays of prolate particles are generated and simulations have been performed to calculate Nusselt number for four different Hermans orientation factors and various Reynolds numbers. From the simulation results, it has been observed that, for any specific value of Hermans orientation factor, Nusselt number increases with the increase of the Reynolds number and solid volume fraction. More importantly, it is found that the effect of orientations on Nusselt number is significant. Nusselt number correlation is developed for ellipsoidal particles as function of Reynolds number, Prandtl number, solid volume fraction, and orientation factors. This correlation is valid for 0.1≤c≤0.3 and 0<Re≤100

A Comparative Study of Models for Heat Transfer in Bidisperse Gas&ndash;Solid Systems via CFD&ndash;DEM Simulations

In this study, flow and heat transfers in bidisperse gas&ndash;solid systems were numerically investigated using the computational fluid dynamics&ndash;discrete element method (CFD&ndash;DEM). Three different models to close the gas&ndash;solid heat transfer coefficient for each species of bidisperse systems were compared in the simulations. The effect of the particle diameter ratio and particle number ratio between large and small particles on the particle mean temperature and temperature distribution of each species were systematically investigated. The simulation results show that differences in the particle mean temperature and temperature distribution profiles exist among the three heat transfer models at a higher particle number ratio. The differences between the effects of three heat transfer models on heat transfer properties in bidisperse systems with particle diameter ratios of up to 4 are marginal when the particle number ratio between small and large particles is 1

The topological graph of Heterogeneous Network.

<p>The topological graph of Heterogeneous Network.</p

Enhancing the Flexibility of TCP in Heterogeneous Network

<div><p>Due to a set of constant initial values, the performance of conventional TCP drops significantly encountering heterogeneous network, showing low throughput and unfairness. This paper firstly demonstrates the chaotic character of TCP congestion control in heterogeneous network, especially the sensitivity to initial value. Inspired by merit of nature-inspired algorithm, a novel structure of TCP congestion control (IPPM, Internet Prey-Predator Model) is proposed. Parameters such as available link capacity(<i>C</i>), congestion window (<i>W</i>) and queue length (<i>Q</i>) are collected by IPPM, which calculates the max value of <i>C</i> according to the interacting relationship existing in <i>C</i>, <i>W</i> and <i>Q</i>, and IPPM initiates the TCP ssthresh with the calculated value. Plenty of simulation results show that the modified TCP can effectively avoid network congestion and packet loss. Besides, it holds high resource utilization, convergence speeds, fairness and stability.</p></div