Preserving the Soul of Houston's Third Ward: With Transit-Oriented Developments + Form-based Codes

Transit-Oriented Development ("TOD") has been used as a smart growth catalyst for renewal, maximizing accessibility and opportunity. However, these new investments can raise rapid appreciation in property and housing costs, spurring the possibility for gentrification in low-income neighborhoods. Many TODs fail to integrate this new mixed-use development with the context, potentially obliterating existing communities. The use of form-based codes in designing TODs can preserve the social infrastructure that makes up the soul of the community. Third Ward, Houston, TX will serve as a case study addressing how a TOD can help revitalize a vernacular neighborhood by revealing its own identity and "sense of place" against the pressures of gentrification

A Meta-narrative Review of Textured Implants and Associated Lymphoma Risks

In 2011, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) identified that breast implants are associated with breast implant-associated anaplastic large cell lymphoma (BIA-ALCL). Until 2022, a total of 1130 cases were globally recorded (Health, 2021). Even though researchers are attempting to determine the risks, the accurate etiology has not been determined yet. Comparisons of previous published works are widespread in different potential causes. Hence, we aim to focus on defining how different implants link to BIA-ALCL, especially smooth and textured implants. The review follows the meta-narrative approach with the Pubmed database (2018- now) to collect, combine, and contrast data. All the articles focus on the correlation between the texture of breast implants and BIA-ALCL. The 5 selected studies highlighted similarities and differences to find gaps, limitations among articles and investigate answers for new findings. Classification systems for implant surfaces are divided into groups based on texturing, the parameters of surface area, and bacteria growth. There have been no confirmed cases of BIA-ALCL in patients who have received only smooth breast implants while evidence has reflected textured surface links to the risk of this cancer. Intermediate and high textured surfaces are 10 times higher that links to ALCL than low-surface-area texture (Siltex). Silimed polyurethane, measured as surface grade 4, carries the highest surface area and surface roughness and has been demonstrated to have significantly higher rates of bacterial growth. Without a uniform definition, using the same terms (eg, microtexture and macrotexture) in multiple contexts causes difficulties to compare risks for BIA-ALCLhttps://openworks.mdanderson.org/rmps/1001/thumbnail.jp

Shuttle Wastewater Solution Characterization

During the 31st shuttle mission to the International Space Station, STS-129, there was a clogging event in the shuttle wastewater tank. A routine wastewater dump was performed during the mission and before the dump was completed, degraded flow was observed. In order to complete the wastewater dump, flow had to be rerouted around the dump filter. As a result, a basic chemical and microbial investigation was performed to understand the shuttle wastewater system and perform mitigation tasks to prevent another blockage. Testing continued on the remaining shuttle flights wastewater and wastewater tank cleaning solutions. The results of the analyses and the effect of the mitigation steps are detailed in this paper

LP-OVOD: Open-Vocabulary Object Detection by Linear Probing

This paper addresses the challenging problem of open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) where an object detector must identify both seen and unseen classes in test images without labeled examples of the unseen classes in training. A typical approach for OVOD is to use joint text-image embeddings of CLIP to assign box proposals to their closest text label. However, this method has a critical issue: many low-quality boxes, such as over- and under-covered-object boxes, have the same similarity score as high-quality boxes since CLIP is not trained on exact object location information. To address this issue, we propose a novel method, LP-OVOD, that discards low-quality boxes by training a sigmoid linear classifier on pseudo labels retrieved from the top relevant region proposals to the novel text. Experimental results on COCO affirm the superior performance of our approach over the state of the art, achieving $\textbf{40.5}$ in $\text{AP}_{novel}$ using ResNet50 as the backbone and without external datasets or knowing novel classes during training. Our code will be available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/LP-OVOD.Comment: Accepted to WACV 202

Association between carotid intima-media thickness and bone mineral density: A cross-sectional study in Vietnamese men and women aged 50 years and older

© 2019 Author(s). Objectives The association between osteoporosis and atherosclerosis remains controversial. We sought to define the relationship between carotid intima-media thickness and bone mineral density (BMD) in individuals of Vietnamese background. Design and setting Cross-sectional study in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Participants The study involved 1460 individuals (559 men) aged 50 years and older (average age 59 years) who were randomly recruited from the community. Outcome measures BMD at the femoral neck and lumbar spine was measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (Hologic, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA). Carotid intima-media thickness (cIMT) was measured using a Philips Ultrasonography (HD7XE). The presence of atherosclerotic plaque was ascertained for each individual. The association between cIMT and BMD was analysed by a multiple linear regression model. Results In unadjusted analysis, cIMT was positively associated with femoral neck BMD in men (p=0.005), but not in women (p=0.242). After adjusting for age, smoking, diabetes and hypertension, the association remained statistically significant in men (partial R 2 =0.005; p=0.015) but not in women (partial R 2 =0.008; p=0.369). When the analysis was limited to individuals aged 60 years and older, the association between cIMT and BMD was no longer statistically significant. There was no statistically significant association between cIMT and lumbar spine BMD in either men or women. Conclusions In Vietnamese individuals aged 50 years and older, there is a clinically non-significant but statistically significant association between carotid intima-media thickness and BMD in men, not in women

TopicGPT: A Prompt-based Topic Modeling Framework

Topic modeling is a well-established technique for exploring text corpora. Conventional topic models (e.g., LDA) represent topics as bags of words that often require "reading the tea leaves" to interpret; additionally, they offer users minimal semantic control over topics. To tackle these issues, we introduce TopicGPT, a prompt-based framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to uncover latent topics within a provided text collection. TopicGPT produces topics that align better with human categorizations compared to competing methods: for example, it achieves a harmonic mean purity of 0.74 against human-annotated Wikipedia topics compared to 0.64 for the strongest baseline. Its topics are also more interpretable, dispensing with ambiguous bags of words in favor of topics with natural language labels and associated free-form descriptions. Moreover, the framework is highly adaptable, allowing users to specify constraints and modify topics without the need for model retraining. TopicGPT can be further extended to hierarchical topical modeling, enabling users to explore topics at various levels of granularity. By streamlining access to high-quality and interpretable topics, TopicGPT represents a compelling, human-centered approach to topic modeling

Baryonic D Decay Ds+→pnˉD_s^+\to p\bar n and Its Implication

The channel $D_s^+\to p\bar n$ is the only kinematically allowed baryonic D decay. It proceeds solely through the W-annihilation topology. Hence, a recent observation of this mode by CLEO will shed light on the dynamics of W-annihilation. At the short-distance level, its branching ratio is very small, of order $10^{-6}$, owing to chiral suppression. It receives long-distance contributions through final-state scattering of the leading tree and color-suppressed amplitudes. Assuming that the long-distance enhancement of W-annihilation in the baryonic D decay is similar to that in the mesonic $D_s^+$ decay, where the latter can be obtained from the analysis of the diagrammatic approach, we find that $D_s^+\to p\bar n$ becomes visible. The observation of this baryonic D decay implies the dynamical enhancement of the W-annihilation topology in the $D_s^+$ decay.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, one reference added, to appear in PL

Correlation between Resilient Modulus MR and Deviator Stress for Subgrade soils of northern provinces in Vietnam

Recently, Resilient Modulus is applied in pavement structural design in Vietnam. The resilient modulus of subgrade soil is an essential input parameter for a flexible pavement design. The resilient modulus depends on soil properties, stress state, and soil type.  However, there is limited research on resilient modulus of soils and models to estimate resilient modulus in Vietnam. Therefore, in this study, soil samples were collected from two provinces in northern Vietnam, namely Bac Giang province and Ninh Binh province, and then physical and mechanical tests were conducted for these samples. In addition, a series of cyclic triaxial tests also conducted according to AASHTO T307 specification to obtain resilient modulus of these soils.  The results showed that the resilient modulus decreased with the increase of deviator stress for Bac Giang samples and increased with the increase of deviator stress in the case of Ninh Binh samples. Simple deviator stress models have developed to estimate a resilient modulus of soils in the area