Review of Human Coronaviruses and Other Respiratory Viruses and their Neurological Impact on the Central Nervous System

Comprehensive reporting shows that some pathogens, including COVID-19, influenza A and SARS-CoV have sometimes caused pandemics and were linked to more serious diseases and death. A number of respiratory viruses can travel from the respiratory tract to the central nervous system, causing alterations and damage and resulting in long-term neurological diseases.

Heat or Eat? Cold Weather Shocks and Nutrition in Poor American Families

We examine the effects of cold weather periods on family budgets and on nutritional outcomes in poor American families. Expenditures on food and home fuels are tracked by linking the Consumer Expenditure Survey to temperature data. Using the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, we track calorie consumption, dietary quality, vitamin deficiencies, and anemia in summer and winter months. We find that both rich and poor families increase fuel expenditures in response to unusually cold weather (a 10 degree F drop below normal). At same time, poor families reduce food expenditures by roughly the same amount as the increase in fuel expenditures, while rich families increase food expenditures. Poor adults and children reduce caloric intake by roughly 200 calories during winter months, unlike richer adults and children. In sensitivity analyses, we find that decreases in food expenditure are most pronounced outside the South. We conclude that poor parents and their children outside the South spend and eat less food during cold weather temperature shocks. We surmise that existing social programs fail to buffer against these shocks.

Named entity tagging a very large unbalanced corpus: training and evaluating NE classifiers

We describe a systematic and application-oriented approach to training and evaluating named entity recognition and classification (NERC) systems, the purpose of which is to identify an optimal system and to train an optimal model for named entity tagging DeReKo, a very large general-purpose corpus of contemporary German (Kupietz et al., 2010). DeReKo 's strong dispersion wrt. genre, register and time forces us to base our decision for a specific NERC system on an evaluation performed on a representative sample of DeReKo instead of performance figures that have been reported for the individual NERC systems when evaluated on more uniform and less diverse data. We create and manually annotate such a representative sample as evaluation data for three different NERC systems, for each of which various models are learnt on multiple training data. The proposed sampling method can be viewed as a generally applicable method for sampling evaluation data from an unbalanced target corpus for any sort of natural language processing

Safety App

Victims of crime in Ohio now have access to an entire community of help in the palm of their hand with AVIATOR, a new mobile app developed by Family Services of Dayton and the University of Dayton Research Institute

A bistable soft gripper with mechanically embedded sensing and actuation for fast closed-loop grasping

Soft robotic grippers are shown to be high effective for grasping unstructured objects with simple sensing and control strategies. However, they are still limited by their speed, sensing capabilities and actuation mechanism. Hence, their usage have been restricted in highly dynamic grasping tasks. This paper presents a soft robotic gripper with tunable bistable properties for sensor-less dynamic grasping. The bistable mechanism allows us to store arbitrarily large strain energy in the soft system which is then released upon contact. The mechanism also provides flexibility on the type of actuation mechanism as the grasping and sensing phase is completely passive. Theoretical background behind the mechanism is presented with finite element analysis to provide insights into design parameters. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate sensor-less dynamic grasping of an unknown object within 0.02 seconds, including the time to sense and actuate

Composite vertices that lead to soft form factors

The momentum-space cut-off parameter $\Lambda$ of hadronic vertex functions is studied in this paper. We use a composite model where we can measure the contributions of intermediate particle propagations to $\Lambda$. We show that in many cases a composite vertex function has a much smaller cut-off than its constituent vertices, particularly when light constituents such as pions are present in the intermediate state. This suggests that composite meson-baryon-baryon vertex functions are rather soft, i.e., they have \Lambda considerably less than 1 GeV. We discuss the origin of this softening of form factors as well as the implications of our findings on the modeling of nuclear reactions.Comment: REVTex, 19 pages, 5 figs(to be provided on request

Mapping Topic Evolution Across Poetic Traditions

Poetic traditions across languages evolved differently, but we find that certain semantic topics occur in several of them, albeit sometimes with temporal delay, or with diverging trajectories over time. We apply Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to poetry corpora of four languages, i.e. German (52k poems), English (85k poems), Russian (18k poems), and Czech (80k poems). We align and interpret salient topics, their trend over time (1600--1925 A.D.), showing similarities and disparities across poetic traditions with a few select topics, and use their trajectories over time to pinpoint specific literary epochs

Food Limitation as a Potentially Emerging Contributor to the Asian Vulture Crisis

It was believed that the reason for decline in Asian vulture population is the drug, Diclofenac sodium (DFS), used in livestock. Even after declaring the DFS use banned by the government, apparent decrease in the population of vultures was reported. Alternate hypothesis was suggested that food limitation may be a cause of Asian vulture crisis in Pakistan. Very recent shifts in livestock utilization observed in Pakistan may present a significant barrier to vulture recovery. Increased livestock utilization is translated to fewer carcasses. Since 2005, no livestock carcasses were found in 1650 km transect in the habitat of vultures. Carcasses recorded 13 in 1999 gradually declined to almost zero in 2005 and onwards, which suggests DFS may not be the only cause of Asian Vulture Crisi