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Being overweight and obesity are emerging public health issues in sub-Saharan Africa. Currently, there is limited knowledge on the temporal trend of the effect of socioeconomic factors and air quality on being overweight or obesity. Using data from the Ugandan Demographic and Health Survey and NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), we examined the spatio-temporal effect of individual and contextual factors on overweight and obesity among women in Uganda using cross-sectional data on 15,655 women in Uganda. We employed multilevel mixed-effect analysis and Bayesian hierarchical spatial models to examine the effect of individual socioeconomic status, contextual socioeconomic factors and air quality on women’s risk of being overweight or obese as well as investigate spatial heterogeneity in the association. The prevalence of overweight/obesity for the study periods were 17.23% (2000/2001), 15.36% (2006), 19.36% (2011) and 21.93% (2016). The result from the multilevel analysis shows change in the directions of the association between individual factors (educational status and household wealth) and overweight or obese over the years. Women with secondary education were 1.514 times (p = 0.002) more likely to be overweight or obese in the 2000/2001 group but 0.655 times (p = 0.007) less likely to be overweight or obese in the 2016 group. It also reveals temporal consistency in the effect of the air pollutant PM2.5 on overweight or obese. The spatial models reveal spatial heterogeneity in the association between district-level factors and the proportion of overweight or obese women. The findings suggest improving women’s socioeconomic status and air quality could reduce the rising obesity epidemic in Ugandan women.

Globalization pressure on organizations calls for new approaches to survive, grow, and compete. An approach is to allow inter-organizational business processes (IOBP) collaboration where each partner would expose its public know-how without putting its private know-how at-risk nor impeding this collaboration from happening. Private processes would be the result of running views over public processes. For a successful IOBP collaboration, constraints like temporal need to be satisfied. Organizations could have different time requirements. This paper presents an approach for generating views over collaborative IOBP along with satisfying the combined temporal constraints that would restrict these collaborative IOBP. The paper also details how the consistency of these constraints would be achieved. The approach is illustrated using an online shopping scenario and demonstrated through a system.

Temporal knowledge graph embedding can be used to improve the coverage of temporal KGs via link predictions. Most existing works only concentrate on the target facts themselves, regardless of the rich and informative interactions between the target facts and their highly-related contexts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to take advantage of useful contextual interactions from two aspects, namely temporal consistency and contextual consistency. More specifically, temporal consistency measures how well the target fact interacts with its surrounding contexts in the temporal dimension, while contextual consistency treats all facts as a whole integrity and captures the semantic interactions between multiple contexts. Additionally, considering the existence of useless and misleading context information, we design a crafted context selection strategy to pick out the most useful contexts with reference to the target facts, and then encode them using deep neural networks to capture the temporal and semantic interactions. Experimental results on real world datasets verify the effectiveness of our proposals comparing with competitive KGE methods and temporal KGE methods.

Maintaining temporal consistency of real-time data is important for cyber-physical systems. Most of the previous studies focus on uniprocessor systems. In this paper, the problem of temporal consistency maintenance on multiprocessor platforms with instance skipping was formulated based on the (m,k)-constrained model. A partitioned scheduling method SC-AD was proposed to solve the problem. SC-AD uses a derived sufficient schedulability condition to calculate the initial value of m for each sensor transaction. It then partitions the transactions among the processors in a balanced way. To further reduce the average relative invalid time of real-time data, SC-AD judiciously increases the values of m for transactions assigned to each processor. Experiment results show that SC-AD outperforms the baseline methods in terms of the average relative invalid time and the average valid ratio under different system workloads.

Host-country terrorism poses extreme uncertainty to MNEs’ foreign operations. However, little is known about how MNEs respond to host-country terrorist attacks and how they make the related decisions. Drawing on the research on MNEs’ responses to exogenous shocks and the inter-firm imitation literature, we argue that MNEs obtain relevant information from peers’ actions under terrorist attacks to inform their own responses. Thus, MNEs are more likely to divest under host-country terrorist attacks when peers also divest. Furthermore, the impact of peers’ divestments on focal MNEs’ divestments is magnified by the temporal consistency in peers’ behavioral pattern under terrorist attacks, as temporal consistency reduces inferential difficulties. Empirical evidence based on 93 Fortune US companies and their 8698 foreign subsidiaries over 2005–2015 support our hypotheses. Our study extends the literature on MNEs’ responses to host-country exogenous shocks and on inter-firm imitation by demonstrating the social amplification of terrorism threat and the role of temporal consistency in inter-firm imitation under extreme uncertainty. Practically, we stress that MNE executives should always consider their firms’ idiosyncratic situations when modeling peer MNEs’ actions, and be mindful that they are especially likely to imitate peers’ temporally consistent behaviors under extreme uncertainty.

Current approaches of human body skeleton extraction mainly suffer from following problems: insufficient temporal and spatial continuity, unrobust to background, ambient noise, etc. This paper proposes a three-dimensional human body skeleton extraction method from consecutive meshes. We extract the consistent skeletons from consecutive surfaces based on shape segmentation and skeleton sequences; then, we present a spatiotemporal skeleton optimization model to adjust the skeleton sequences. Experiments on multiview images captured from a light field device demonstrate that our method captures more complete and accurate skeletons compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Video stitching enables creation of videos with a wide field of view from videos captured from ordinary, probably moderately displaced, cameras. In this paper, a novel video stitching algorithm based on multi-view feature detection and registration using region-based statistics has been proposed. While stitching the videos captured using moving cameras, the motion in those cameras will affect the alignment of video frames. Movements in the cameras and in the objects will affect the temporal consistency while stitching the videos. Temporally reliable feature points are considered to maintain both spatial and temporal consistency using multi-view spatiotemporal feature points in this paper. Experiments have been carried out on different data sets, and the results showed the better and effective performance of the proposed approach.

In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical scheme for detection and tracking of vehicles using a vehicle-mounted camera in nighttime under urban environment, where a vehicle can be represented by a pair of taillights and various types of lights are commonplace. The proposed scheme, therefore, mainly focuses on devising robust detection and pairing of taillights in spite of their inherent diversity and continuous transformation in appearance. Thus the appearance symmetry, which many conventional methods rely on, for paring is not guaranteed to be available all the times. Each of the three layers in the scheme is devised to identify a vehicle from individual lights and clutters detected in a hierarchical manner. Robust detection of a pair of taillights, which can be regarded as a vehicle, is sought by successive groupings of the components in a layer and checking not only the intra-layer but the inter-layer relations between them. A structural Kalman filter is employed to maintain the temporal consistency in the motion of the components and their relations as well. Exploiting such relational information increases accuracy in tracking of individual components by reducing effects from fluctuation in positions and shapes, and eventually compensating possible failures in detection of them. As a result, the proposed scheme achieves enhancement in detection and tracking of vehicles in nighttime as proven by experiments on videos including crowded urban traffic scenes.

This study demonstrated the usefulness of very long-range terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) for analysis of the spatial distribution of a snowpack, to distances up to 3000 m, one of the longest measurement range reported to date. Snow depth data were collected using a terrestrial laser scanner during 11 periods of snow accumulation and melting, over three snow seasons on a Pyrenean hillslope characterized by a large elevational gradient, steep slopes, and avalanche occurrence. The maximum and mean absolute snow depth error found was 0.5-0.6 and 0.2-0.3 m respectively, which may result problematic for areas with a shallow snowpack, but it is sufficiently accurate to determine snow distribution patterns in areas characterized by a thick snowpack. The results indicated that in most cases there was temporal consistency in the spatial distribution of the snowpack, even in different years. The spatial patterns were particularly similar amongst the surveys conducted during the period dominated by snow accumulation (generally until end of April), or amongst those conducted during the period dominated by melting processes (generally after mid of April or early May). Simple linear correlation analyses for the 11 survey dates, and the application of Random Forests analysis to two days representative of snow accumulation and melting periods indicated the importance of topography to the snow distribution. The results also highlight that elevation and the Topographic Position index (TPI) were the main variables explaining the snow distribution, especially during periods dominated by melting. The intra- and inter-annual spatial consistency of the snowpack distribution suggests that the geomorphological processes linked to presence/absence of snow cover act in a similar way in the long term, and that these spatial patterns can be easily identified through several years of adequate monitoring.

International audience; Simple Temporal Networks (STNs) provide a powerful and general tool for representing conjunctions of maximum delay constraints over ordered pairs of temporal variables. In this paper we introduce Hyper Temporal Networks (HyTNs), a strict generalization of STNs, to overcome the limitation of considering only conjunctions of constraints but maintaining a practical efficiency in the consistency check of the instances. In a Hyper Temporal Network a single temporal hyperarc constraint may be defined as a set of two or more maximum delay constraints which is satisfied when at least one of these delay constraints is satisfied. HyTNs are meant as a light generalization of STNs offering an interesting compromise. On one side, there exist practical pseudo-polynomial time algorithms for checking consistency and computing feasible schedules for HyTNs. On the other side, HyTNs offer a more powerful model accommodating natural constraints that cannot be expressed by STNs like “Trigger off exactly δ min before (after) the occurrence of the first (last) event in a set.”, which are used to represent synchronization events in some process aware information systems/workflow models proposed in the literature.

Temporal changes in the amounts of trace elements (As, Co, Cu, Mn, Ni, Pb, and Zn) and their correlations with temporal changes in charcoal abundance in age-dated sediments collected from Lake Thompson in Patagonia, Chile, attest to the substantial pyrogenic remobilization of contaminants that occurred in Patagonia during the mid-1900s. This remobilization was concurrent with the extensive slash and burn period in the region during that period. The changes in concentrations of Co, Cu, and Ni in relation to charcoal abundance in the lacustrine sediments over time were small compared to those of As, Mn, Pb, and Zn. However, the relatively low enrichment factors of all those trace elements, normalized to Fe, indicate that they were predominantly derived from local, natural sources impacted by fires rather than industrial sources. The primarily local source of Pb in the sediments was corroborated by the temporal consistency of its isotopic ratios (206Pb/207Pb:208Pb/206Pb), which were similar to previously reported values for natural lead in Central and Southern Chile. However, the pyrogenic remobilization of both natural and industrial trace elements by forest fires in Chile and elsewhere is expected to rise as a consequence of climate change, which is projected to increase both the frequency and intensity of forest fires on a global scale.

Annual thawing/freezing indices (TIs and FIs) for ten meteorological stations in the China Tianshan Mountains (CTM) are analyzed based on the daily maximum and minimum temperature records during 1961–2010. These indices are submitted for trend analysis and change-point analysis. The correlations between the TIs and FIs and the annual mass balance (AMB) for the No. 1 glacier, a rapid regressing small-scale glacier with the solely longest observed time series of the AMB at the headwater of the Urumqi River in the CTM, were analyzed in order to demonstrate the implication behind variations in the TIs and FIs. Furthermore, to explain atmospheric controls of the TI and FI variations, correlations between large-scale climatic forcing, e.g., the mean NAO indices and the mean Arctic Oscillation (AO) and the TIs and the FIs were analyzed. The results show that there were obvious upward trends in the TIs and downward trends in the FIs occurred, which demonstrates an increasing thawing and decreasing freezing potential in the CTM during the period of 1961–2010. Change-point analysis revealed evident change point around the year 1997 for the TIs at most of the stations, while various change points for the FIs. Obvious negative relationships between the TIs and the AMB for the No. 1 glacier have been found. Also, significant change point around the year 1996/1997 has been detected for the AMB time series. The revealed tight links between the TIs and the AMB, and also temporal consistency of change points indicates that changes in the TIs could be one of the main factors resulted in changes in the AMB of No. 1 glacier. Furthermore, significant negative correlation between the TIs and FIs and the mean summer NAO index for most stations are also found, demonstrating that the variations in TIs and FIs in the CTM were possibly related with changes in NAO.

We propose a novel approach to the real-time landing site detection and assessment in unconstrained man-made environments using passive sensors. Because this task must be performed in a few seconds or less, existing methods are often limited to simple local intensity and edge variation cues. By contrast, we show how to efficiently take into account the potential sites' global shape, which is a critical cue in man-made scenes. Our method relies on a new segmentation algorithm and shape regularity measure to look for polygonal regions in video sequences. In this way, we enforce both temporal consistency and geometric regularity, resulting in very reliable and consistent detections. We demonstrate our approach for the detection of landable sites such as rural fields, building rooftops and runways from color and infrared monocular sequences significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art.

The growing use of ‘targeted profiling’ approaches for the deconvolution of 1D-1H-NMR spectra by comparison to a pure compound library has created a need for an in-depth characterization of quantification variability that is beyond what is currently available in the literature. In this study, we explore the underlying source of quantification variability (tube insertion, spectra acquisition, and profiling) as well as a number of other factors, such as temporal consistency of repeated NMR scans, human consistency in repeated profiles, and human versus machine sampling. We also look at the effect of different pulse sequences on the differences between acquired spectra and the peak reference library. Two sample types were considered for this work—a synthetic five compound mixture as well as human urine. The result is a comprehensive examination of 1D-1H-NMR quantification error. Our investigation into variability sources revealed that apart from profiling, sample insertion and/or shimming can play a significant role in final quantification, a finding that is equally applicable to all integration-based methods of quantification. Both sources of error were also found to have temporal relationships, with bias identified as a function of both scan and profiling order, reinforcing the need for randomization in scanning and profiling. As well as presenting a practical estimate of variability in human urine samples, we have uncovered a considerable amount of complexity in underlying NMR variability that will hopefully serve as impetus for future exploration in this area.

Previous works on maintaining temporal consistency of real-time data objects mainly focuses on real-time database systems in which the transmission delays (jitters) of update jobs are simply ignored. However, this assumption does not hold in distributed real-time systems where the jitters of the update jobs can be large and change unpredictably with time. In this paper, we examine the design problems when the More-Less (ML) approach (Xiong and Ramamritham in Proc. of the IEEE real-time systems symposium 1999; IEEE Trans Comput 53:567---583, 2004), known to be an efficient scheme for maintaining temporal consistency of real-time data objects, is applied in a distributed real-time system environment. We propose two new extensions based on ML, called Jitter-based More-Less (JB-ML) and Statistical Jitter-based More-Less (SJB-ML) to address the jitter problems. JB-ML assumes that in the system the jitter is a constant for each update task, and it provides a deterministic guarantee in temporal consistency of the real-time data objects. SJB-ML further relaxes this restriction and provides a statistical guarantee based on the given QoS requirements of the real-time data objects. We demonstrate through extensive simulation experiments that both JB-ML and SJB-ML are effective approaches and they significantly outperform ML in terms of improving schedulability.

A real-time object is one whose state may become invalid with the passage of time. A temporal validity interval is associated with the object state, and the real-time object is temporally consistent if its temporal validity interval has not expired. Clearly, the problem of maintaining temporal consistency of data is motivated by the need for a real-time system to track its environment correctly. Hence, sensor transactions must be able to execute periodically and also each instance of a transaction should perform the relevant data update before its deadline. Unfortunately, the period and deadline assignment problem for periodic sensor transactions has not received the attention that it deserves. An exception is the More-Less scheme, which uses the Deadline Monotonic (DM) algorithm for scheduling periodic sensor transactions. However, there is no work addressing this problem from the perspective of dynamic priority scheduling. In this paper, we examine the problem of temporal consistency maintenance using the Earliest Deadline First (EDF) algorithm in three steps: First, the problem is transformed to another problem with a sufficient (but not necessary) condition for feasibly assigning periods and deadlines. An optimal solution for the problem can be found in linear time, and the resulting processor utilization is characterized and compared to a traditional approach. Second, an algorithm to search for the optimal periods and deadlines is proposed. The problem can be solved for sensor transactions that require any arbitrary deadlines. However, the optimal algorithm does not scale well when the problem size increases. Hence, thirdly, we propose a heuristic search-based algorithm that is more efficient than the optimal algorithm and is capable of finding a solution if one exists.

The flexibility of high level authoring models (such as SMIL 2.0) for the edition of complex Interactive Multimedia Documents can lead authors, in certain cases, to specify synchronization relations which could not be satisfied during the presentation of the document, thus characterizing the occurrence of temporal inconsistencies. For this reason, we need to apply a methodology which provides the formal semantics for the dynamic behaviour of the document, consistency checking, and the scheduling of the presentation taking into account the temporal non-determinism of these documents. This paper refers to a methodology for the formal design of Interactive Multimedia Documents based on the formal description technique RT-LOTOS. In particular, this paper presents an approach applied by our methodology for the automatic translation of SMIL 2.0 documents into RT-LOTOS specifications. A flexibilidade de modelos de autoria de alto nível (tais como o de SMIL 2.0) para a edição de Documentos Multimídia Interativos complexos pode levar os autores, em certos casos, a especificar relações de sincronização que não podem ser satisfeitas durante a apresentação do documento, caracterizando a ocorrência de inconsistências temporais. Por essa razão, é necessária a utilização de uma metodologia que ofereça uma semântica formal para o comportamento do documento, realize a verificação de consistência, o escalonamento e a apresentação levando em consideração o não-determinismo temporal desses documentos. Este artigo faz referência a uma metodologia para a concepção formal de Documentos Multimídia Interativos baseados na Técnica de Descrição Formal RT-LOTOS. Em particular, este artigo apresenta uma abordagem, utilizada pela nossa metodologia, para a tradução automática de documentos SMIL 2.0 em especificações RT-LOTOS.

A study was conducted to replicate and to expand some of our earlier findings concerning child molesters' perceptions of themselves, children, and adults. Sixty-eight men incarcerated in the Ontario correctional system for sexual offenses against children and 70 men with "person-related" but nonsexual offenses participated in the research. In accord with previous results, differences between molesters and nonmolesters in terms of their actual and ideal self-descriptions on the semantic differential were found. Molesters described themselves in less positive sexual terms than did nonmolesters. Women were seen by molesters more negatively with respect to sexual and physical characteristics than by nonmolesters, although, somewhat paradoxically, molesters described women as more trusting and mature than nonmolesters did. Molesters also reported a more positive view of women on the Attitudes Toward Women Scale than comparison participants. Molesters and nonmolesters also differed in terms of their responses to the Criminal Sentiments Scale, with child molesters reporting a more favorable view of the police, courts, and legal process than comparison participants. A similar finding was revealed in ratings of authority figures: Child molesters described authorities as kinder and less repulsive, deceitful, and unpleasant than comparison participants. All scales employed revealed a moderate to high temporal consistency. Some clinical implications and applications of the work are discussed briefly.

In this paper, we respond to Ranney's (1994) comment on our paper on naive physics (Cooke & Breedin, 1994). In his comment, Ranney criticizes our methods and analyses, as well as our claims of theoretical inconsistency. In response to Ranney, we show that mast of his criticisms can be traced to several misconceptions. Some of these misconceptions seem to stem from his drawing of inappropriate similarities between his own research and ours. Specifically, ftanney seems to hall faun' misconceptions about our research: (1) the belief that trajectory responses in our study were relevant to our claims about theoretical consistency, (2) tie belief that aggregation of theoretical variations weakens claims of inconsistency, (3) the belief that the method of written reports is inferior to the method of structured interviews, and (4) the belief that our proposal of on-the-fly theorizing is at odds with temporal consistency and nonimpetus beliefs.

This study explores the allocation mechanisms in the public provision of interregional transport and communication infrastructure in Sweden. The logistics of the flow of infrastructure investments from the government budget is examined. The purpose is to consider how the demand for infrastructure investment is estimated by public agencies, how judgments are made on governmental expenditure policy, and what determines the spatial distribution of infrastructure investment. The analysis is carried out along four main lines; demand for infrastructure services, political intentions and goals, the modal composition of investments for transport and communication, and the spatial distribution of infrastructure. The discussion considers functional, spatial, and temporal consistency aspects in the public provision of infrastructure.

The present study used a prospective design to assess the ability of the reformulated learned helplessness model of depression to predict affective reactions to a stressful event. A total of 131 university students completed measures of depressive attributional style, trait depression, and performance aspirations for an upcoming course examination. Immediately following the exam, subjects completed a state depression measure; subjects again reported their state depression immediately following receipt of their examination grades. The discrepancy between subjects' grade aspirations and their achieved grades was used as a measure of subjective stress. Analyses indicated that a depressive attributional style interacted with this measure of subjective stress to predict changes in depressive mood following the examination, but not after receipt of their grades. The pattern of results is discussed in light of (a) the need for research investigating temporal factors in vulnerabilities for depressive mood and (b) the limitations of the study.