Sources and Exposures of Ambient Air Pollutants and Their Relationship to Adverse Birth Outcomes and Respiratory Disease.

The current literature provides, at best, inconsistent associations between exposures to conventional air pollutants and adverse birth outcomes. Additionally, very few studies have investigated linkages between toxic air pollutants and acute respiratory-related illness among children. While a variety of data imputation and cleaning techniques are available, the evaluation of such techniques for toxic air pollutants remains limited. Criteria air pollutant (SO2, CO, NO2 and PM10) exposures were used in logistic regression models to estimate adjusted odds ratios of low birth weight (LBW), small-for-gestational-age (SGA) and preterm (PTB) births among women in Detroit, Michigan (1990-2001). Poisson regression models were used to estimate adjusted risk ratios of emergency department (ED) visits for respiratory illness among children making Medicaid claims in Dearborn, Michigan (2001-2002) and exposures to urban air toxics (UATs) distilled into source classes using receptor models. This study also included the analysis of intra- and inter-laboratory precisions for UATs using 122 pairs of replicate samples, and evaluated the performance of two imputation methods, multiple imputation and optimal linear estimation. Among 155,000 singleton births examined, SGA was associated with exposure to NO2 (OR=1.10, 95% confidence interval=1.01-1.19), CO (1.14, 1.02-1.27) and PM10 (1.22, 1.04-1.44). SO2 exposure was associated with PTB (1.07, 1.01-1.14) and LBW (1.16, 1.04-1.30). Among the 7,863 children making Medicaid claims, ED visits for respiratory problems increased with exposures to UATs from fuel combustion sources (1.44, 1.03-2.01), photochemical pollutants (1.48, 1.15-1.90) and gasoline exhaust/evaporated gasoline (1.35, 1.05-1.74). For many compounds, the UAT measurements had very poor reproducibility. Data missing at random could be adequately imputed using either imputation method, but imputations for row-wise deletions, the most common type of missingness pattern, were uninformative. This appears to be the first U.S. study to associate SGA with air pollutant exposures. It highlights the importance of accounting for long-term trends and maternal smoking status. This study also is one of the first to use source-apportioned exposure measures to associate source classes of UATs and respiratory problems in children. This approach is advantageous in that it captures exposures to mixtures, potentially enhances biological plausibility, and accounts for the correlation among pollutants.Ph.D.Industrial HealthUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61635/1/hqle_1.pd

Vitali's theorem without uniform boundedness

Let {fm}m≥1 be a sequence of holomorphic functions defined on a bounded domain D ⊂ Cn or a sequence of rational functions (1 ≤ deg rm ≤ m) defined on Cn. We are interested infinding sufficient conditions to ensure the convergence of {fm}m≥1 on a large set provided the convergence holds pointwise on a not too small set. This type of result is inspired from a theorem of Vitali which gives a positive answer for uniformly bounded sequence

LG-Hand: Advancing 3D Hand Pose Estimation with Locally and Globally Kinematic Knowledge

3D hand pose estimation from RGB images suffers from the difficulty of obtaining the depth information. Therefore, a great deal of attention has been spent on estimating 3D hand pose from 2D hand joints. In this paper, we leverage the advantage of spatial-temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Networks and propose LG-Hand, a powerful method for 3D hand pose estimation. Our method incorporates both spatial and temporal dependencies into a single process. We argue that kinematic information plays an important role, contributing to the performance of 3D hand pose estimation. We thereby introduce two new objective functions, Angle and Direction loss, to take the hand structure into account. While Angle loss covers locally kinematic information, Direction loss handles globally kinematic one. Our LG-Hand achieves promising results on the First-Person Hand Action Benchmark (FPHAB) dataset. We also perform an ablation study to show the efficacy of the two proposed objective functions

Discovering Water Quality Changes and Patterns of the Endangered Thi Vai Estuary in Southern Vietnam through Trend and Multivariate Analysis

Temporal and spatial water quality data are essential to evaluate human health risks. Understanding the interlinking variations between water quality and socio-economic development is the key for integrated pollution management. In this study, we applied several multivariate approaches, including trend analysis, cluster analysis, and principal component analysis, to a 15-year dataset of water quality monitoring (1999 to 2013) in the Thi Vai estuary, Southern Vietnam. We discovered a rapid improvement for most of the considered water quality parameters (e.g., DO, NH4, and BOD) by step trend analysis, after the pollution abatement in 2008. Nevertheless, the nitrate concentration increased significantly at the upper and middle parts and decreased at the lower part of the estuary. Principal component (PC) analysis indicates that nowadays the water quality of the Thi Vai is influenced by point and diffuse pollution. The first PC represents soil erosion and stormwater loads in the catchment (TSS, PO4, and Fetotal); the second PC (DO, NO2, and NO3) determines the influence of DO on nitrification and denitrification; and the third PC (pH and NH4) determines point source pollution and dilution by seawater. Therefore, this study demonstrated the need for stricter pollution abatement strategies to restore and to manage the water quality of the Thi Vai Estuary

The role of green finance, eco-innovation, and creativity in the sustainable development goals of ASEAN countries

Recently, sustainable development has become a global requirement. Every country strives to achieve this essential goal, and this attracts the attention of researchers and policymakers. This study investigates the impact of green finance, eco-innovation, and creativity on the sustainable development goals in ASEAN countries. Using CUP-FM and CUP-BC techniques, the study examines the association between variables, and finds that green finance (such as green credit), renewable energy production, eco-innovation, and creativity, have positive associations with sustainable development goals. The control variable, economic growth, has a negative association with sustainable development goals. Based on the evidence, the ASEAN region must increase the quantity of green bonds as a part of green finance. This financial measure would guarantee adequate returns for private investors

Использование препаратов магния в комплексной терапии атопического дерматита

Обоснована необходимость нормализации баланса магния и кальция крови при атопическом дерматите, изучено действие метаболического препарата магнерот при этом заболевании. Показано, что применение магния оротата в комплексном лечении дерматоза способствует улучшению клинического течения болезни и нормализации большинства лабораторных показателей. Полученные результаты свидетельствуют о патогенетической обоснованности препаратов, содержащих магний, в лечении атопического дерматита.The necessity to normalize the balance of the blood magnesium and calcium in atopic dermatitis was substantiated. The effect of Magnerot (a metabolic medication) in this disease was investigated. The use of magnesium orotate in complex treatment of the dermatosis was shown to improve the clinical course of the disease and normalize the majority of the laboratory findings. The obtained findings suggest that the use of magnesium−containing medication in treatment of atopic dermatitis is pathogenetically substantiated

Controllable Group Choreography Using Contrastive Diffusion

Music-driven group choreography poses a considerable challenge but holds significant potential for a wide range of industrial applications. The ability to generate synchronized and visually appealing group dance motions that are aligned with music opens up opportunities in many fields such as entertainment, advertising, and virtual performances. However, most of the recent works are not able to generate high-fidelity long-term motions, or fail to enable controllable experience. In this work, we aim to address the demand for high-quality and customizable group dance generation by effectively governing the consistency and diversity of group choreographies. In particular, we utilize a diffusion-based generative approach to enable the synthesis of flexible number of dancers and long-term group dances, while ensuring coherence to the input music. Ultimately, we introduce a Group Contrastive Diffusion (GCD) strategy to enhance the connection between dancers and their group, presenting the ability to control the consistency or diversity level of the synthesized group animation via the classifier-guidance sampling technique. Through intensive experiments and evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in producing visually captivating and consistent group dance motions. The experimental results show the capability of our method to achieve the desired levels of consistency and diversity, while maintaining the overall quality of the generated group choreography.</jats:p

The Epidemiology of Interpandemic and Pandemic Influenza in Vietnam, 2007–2010: The Ha Nam Household Cohort Study I

Prospective community-based studies have provided fundamental insights into the epidemiology of influenza in temperate regions, but few comparable studies have been undertaken in the tropics. The authors conducted prospective influenza surveillance and intermittent seroprevalence surveys in a household-based cohort in Vietnam between December 2007 and April 2010, resulting in 1,793 person-seasons of influenza surveillance. Age- and sex-standardized estimates of the risk of acquiring any influenza infection per season in persons 5 years of age or older were 21.1% (95% confidence interval: 17.4, 24.7) in season 1, 26.4% (95% confidence interval: 22.6, 30.2) in season 2, and 17.0% (95% confidence interval: 13.6, 20.4) in season 3. Some individuals experienced multiple episodes of infection with different influenza types/subtypes in the same season (n = 27) or reinfection with the same subtype in different seasons (n = 22). The highest risk of influenza infection was in persons 5–9 years old, in whom the risk of influenza infection per season was 41.8%. Although the highest infection risk was in school-aged children, there were important heterogeneities in the age of infection by subtype and season. These heterogeneities could influence the impact of school closure and childhood vaccination on influenza transmission in tropical areas, such as Vietnam

Preparation of SERS Substrates for the Detection of Organic Molecules at Low Concentration

In this paper, we present the results of the preparation of Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) substrates by depositing silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) onto a porous silicon wafer that is produced by the chemical etching process. The influences of the preparation parameters such as resistivity of the silicon wafer, the anodizing current density, etching time to the size of pores were systematically investigated. The SERS substrates prepared were characterised by using appropriate techniques: the morphology and pores size by scanning electron microscope (SEM), the SERS activity by Raman scattering measure of organic molecules malachite green (MG) embedded into the substrate at room temperature. Our experimental results show that a home-made Raman microscope system could be efficiently used to detect the MG molecules at the concentration lower than 10-7 M with the prepared SERS substrates which have Ag NPs in the obtained pores of 10 – 40 nm