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BACKGROUND Breastfeeding is the most effective way to provide food for the healthy growth and development of babies. It has been reported in the literature that interventions on parturients, with the theory of planned behavior (TPB) as the guiding framework, can achieve good results. The purpose of the present study was to explore the effect of the TPB on primipara breastfeeding. METHODS A total of 70 primiparas, who were given regular intervention mode at Haian People's Hospital from May 2017 to May 2018, were selected as the control group, and a total of 70 primiparas, who were given the TPB model from June 2018 to June 2019, were selected as the observation group. Exclusive breastfeeding rates, continuous breastfeeding rates, and breastfeeding confidence and breastfeeding impact factors were compared between the two groups. RESULTS After the intervention, the pure breastfeeding rates of the observation group at discharge, 1 month after delivery, and 4 months after delivery were higher than those of the control group (P

HighlightsAn LED-based candling system was designed to automatically judge egg fertility.LEDs of six different colors were tested for light optimization.Relative absorptivity (RA) was negatively correlated with the L* value and positively correlated with the a* value.The results combined with egg parameters produced higher accuracy than the results without egg parameters.Abstract. Removal of infertile eggs could increase the efficiency of commercial hatcheries by saving space, ensuring the hatching rate, and decreasing costs. In this study, an LED-based candling system was designed to automatically judge egg fertility by measuring photo-resistance, which was converted into the relative absorptivity (RA) of light through the egg. In the first experiment, 85 eggs were used to test LEDs of six different colors (red, yellow, green, blue, warm white, and cold white) during days 0 to 13 of incubation. In the second experiment, 170 eggs were detected with warm white LEDs during days 0 to 10 of incubation to further study whether egg parameters (weight, dimensions, and shell color) affected the accuracy of logistic regression. The detection results of the first experiment indicated that the RA of fertile eggs increased rapidly throughout the first 13 days of incubation, while the RA of infertile eggs increased little. Comparing the detection results for all LEDs, it was found that the warm white LEDs achieved the best results, with an accuracy of 94.9% on day 7. The second experiment showed that the RA was negatively correlated with the L* value (lightness or darkness) and positively correlated with the a* value (color in the red or green direction). Furthermore, on most days of incubation, the results of logistic regression combined with the egg parameters produced higher accuracy than the results without egg parameters. The accuracy was 100% on day 10. This study provides an automatic and non-destructive method to discriminate fertile eggs from infertile eggs for current hatcheries. Keywords: Egg parameters, Fertility, LED, Light optimization.

Objective. To study the effect of nifedipine combined with systematic nursing on pregnancy outcomes in patients with gestational hypertension. Methods. According to the random number table method, 120 patients with gestational hypertension treated in our hospital were divided into the control group (60 cases) and observation group (60 cases). The control group was given magnesium sulfate treatment, the observation group was given magnesium sulfate combined with nifedipine, and the two groups of patients were given systematic nursing. The blood pressure levels, negative emotions, and pregnancy outcomes of the two groups of patients before and after treatment were compared. The blood pressure levels of the two groups before and after treatment were measured by the electronic sphygmomanometer, and the self-rating depression scale (SDS) and self-rating scale (SAS) were used to evaluate the depression and anxiety of the two groups, respectively. Results. After treatment, the systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, SDS score, and SAS score of the two groups were decreased, and the observation group was significantly lower than the control group. Additionally, the observation group had lower incidence of cesarean section, postpartum hemorrhage, premature rupture of membranes, and neonatal asphyxia ( P < 0.05 ). Conclusion. Nifedipine plus systematic nursing in patients with gestational hypertension can effectively improve the pregnancy outcome and adverse emotions such as depression and anxiety, reduce blood pressure, and promote disease recovery.

Great challenges remain in the effective control of irregular and incompressible deep wound bleeding and the promotion of wound healing after bacterial infection. In this study, cryogels were prepared using an ice template based on chitosan (CS), oxidized gallic acid (OGA) and hemin (HE), which are all green edible materials. The cryogels exhibit rapid blood-triggered shape recovery and a high swelling ratio. The cryogels with 5 mg mL

Cu-doped ZnCdS/ZnS (Cu:ZnxCd1−xS/ZnS) core/shell quantum dots (QDs) are synthesized by a facile one-pot noninjection approach to investigate the composition-dependent photoluminescence (PL) properties. The resulting monodisperse Cu:ZnxCd1−xS/ZnS QDs exhibit a tuned band gap energy Eg from 2.84 to 3.13 eV and a wide dopant emission band from 630 to 569 nm when Zn content x increases from 0.2 to 0.5. Furthermore, the decreasing FWHM with increasing Zn content reveals the emission mainly arises from the recombination of electrons in conductor band with localized holes in Cu-related T2 and E level. With Zn content increasing in ZnxCd1−xS host, the relatively perfect lattice match between ZnxCd1−xS core and ZnS shell reduces the PL lifetime and increased PL quantum yield. The temperature dependent PL behavior suggests that the thermal stability of Cu:ZnxCd1−xS/ZnS QDs is enhanced because the interface nonradiative centers are efficiently suppressed by increasing Zn content.

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a common malignant head and neck tumor. Drug resistance and distant metastasis are the predominant cause of treatment failure in NPC patients. Hispidulin is a flavonoid extracted from the bioassay-guided separation of the EtOH extract of Salvia plebeia with strong anti-proliferative activity in nasopharyngeal carcinoma cells (CNE-2Z). In this study, the effects of hispidulin on proliferation, invasion, migration, and apoptosis were investigated in CNE-2Z cells. The [3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide] (MTT) assay and the colony formation assay revealed that hispidulin could inhibit CNE-2Z cell proliferation. Hispidulin (25, 50, 100 μM) also induced apoptosis in a dose-dependent manner in CNE-2Z cells. The expression of Akt was reduced, and the expression of the ratio of Bax/Bcl-2 was increased. In addition, scratch wound and transwell assays proved that hispidulin (6.25, 12.5, 25 μM) could inhibited the migration and invasion in CNE-2Z cells. The expressions of HIF-1α, MMP-9, and MMP-2 were decreased, while the MMPs inhibitor TIMP1 was enhanced by hispidulin. Moreover, hispidulin exhibited potent suppression tumor growth and low toxicity in CNE-2Z cancer-bearing mice at a dosage of 20 mg/kg/day. Thus, hispidulin appears to be a potentially effective agent for NPC treatment.

Background Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to threaten human life worldwide. We explored how human behaviors have been influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong, and how the transmission of other respiratory diseases (eg, influenza) has been influenced by human behavior. Methods We focused on the spread of COVID-19 and influenza infections based on the reported COVID-19 cases and influenza surveillance data and investigated the changes in human behavior due to COVID-19 based on mass transit railway data and the data from a telephone survey. We did the simulation based on a susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered (SEIR) model to assess the risk reduction of influenza transmission caused by the changes in human behavior. Results During the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of passengers fell by 52.0% compared with the same period in 2019. Residents spent 32.2% more time at home. Each person, on average, came into close contact with 17.6 and 7.1 people per day during the normal and pandemic periods, respectively. Students, workers, and older people reduced their daily number of close contacts by 83.0%, 48.1%, and 40.3%, respectively. The close contact rates in residences, workplaces, places of study, restaurants, shopping centers, markets, and public transport decreased by 8.3%, 30.8%, 66.0%, 38.5%, 48.6%, 41.0%, and 36.1%, respectively. Based on the simulation, these changes in human behavior reduced the effective reproduction number of influenza by 63.1%. Conclusions Human behaviors were significantly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong. Close contact control contributed more than 47% to the reduction in infection risk of COVID-19.

Background Edwardsiella tarda causes acute symptoms with ascites in Japanese flounder (Paralichthys olivaceus) and is a major problem for China’s aquaculture sector. Genomic selection (GS) has been widely adopted in breeding industries because it shortens generation intervals and results in the selection of individuals that have great breeding potential with high accuracy. Based on an artificial challenge test and re-sequenced data of 1099 flounders, the aims of this study were to estimate the genetic parameters of resistance to E. tarda in Japanese flounder and to evaluate the accuracy of single-step GBLUP (ssGBLUP), weighted ssGBLUP (WssGBLUP), and BayesB for improving resistance to E. tarda by using three subsets of pre-selected single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). In addition, SNPs that are associated with this trait were identified using a single-SNP genome-wide association study (GWAS) and WssGBLUP. Results We estimated a heritability of 0.13 ± 0.02 for resistance to E. tarda in Japanese flounder. One million SNPs at fixed intervals were selected from 4,978,724 SNPs that passed quality controls. GWAS identified significant SNPs on chromosomes 14 and 24. WssGBLUP revealed that the putative quantitative trait loci on chromosomes 1 and 14 contained SNPs that explained more than 1% of the genetic variance. Three 50 k-SNP subsets were pre-selected based on different criteria. Compared with pedigree-based prediction (ABLUP), the three genomic methods evaluated resulted in at least 7.7% greater accuracy of predictions. The accuracy of these genomic prediction methods was almost unchanged when pre-selected trait-related SNPs were used for prediction. Conclusions Resistance to E. tarda in Japanese flounder has a low heritability. GWAS and WssGBLUP revealed that the genetic architecture of this trait is polygenic. Genomic prediction of breeding values performed better than ABLUP. It is feasible to implement genomic selection to increase resistance to E. tarda in Japanese flounder with 50 k SNPs. Based on the criteria used here, pre-selection of SNPs was not beneficial and other criteria for pre-selection should be considered.

The Japanese flounder is one of the most widely farmed economic flatfish species throughout eastern Asia including China, Korea, and Japan. Edwardsiella tarda is a major species of pathogenic bacteria that causes ascites disease and, consequently, a huge economy loss for Japanese flounder farming. After generation selection, traditional breeding methods can hardly improve the E. tarda resistance effectively. Genomic selection is an effective way to predict the breeding potential of parents and has rarely been used in aquatic breeding. In this study, we chose 931 individuals from 90 families, challenged by E. tarda from 2013 to 2015 as a reference population and 71 parents of these families as selection candidates. 1,934,475 markers were detected via genome sequencing and applied in this study. Two different methods, BayesCπ and GBLUP, were used for genomic prediction. In the reference population, two methods led to the same accuracy (0.946) and Pearson's correlation results between phenotype and genomic estimated breeding value (GEBV) of BayesCπ and GBLUP were 0.912 and 0.761, respectively. In selection candidates, GEBVs from two methods were highly similar (0.980). A comparison of GEBV with the survival rate of families that were structured by selection candidates showed correlations of 0.662 and 0.665, respectively. This study established a genomic selection method for the Japanese flounder and for the first time applied this to E. tarda resistance breeding.

In this paper, we present a uniform acceleration framework for GPU-based interactive visualization of regular scalar fields. Firstly, in order to exploit the coherence of volume fields in both the object space and the image space, we propose a general bi-space rendering proxy (BSRP) to represent volume fields. These BSRP are organized into pointerless tree structures which can index voxels in a multi-scale manner. Based on BSRP, we present a novel multi-scale stream reduction (MSSR) algorithm to rapidly process BSRP-indexed valid voxels (i.e., active voxels in marching cubes or nonempty space in volume raycasting). In the object space, MSSR utilizes pre-computed tree structure to rapidly get rid of invalid voxels using multi-scale BSRP with minimal overhead, and thus can noticeably reduce the complexity of classification, scan and compaction for valid voxels. In the image space, given view parameters, the BSRP containing valid voxels are rasterized in a coarse-scale. Then, MSSR expands them as lossless ray segments for volume raycasting, where both the exterior and interior empty space are skipped. Our framework addresses the acceleration problem by decomposing volume rendering algorithm into several data-parallel stages processing multi-scale stream, which are mapped efficiently to the massively parallel architecture of modern GPUs. Thanks to the proposed MSSR algorithm, our framework is immune to the changes of iso-value, transfer function and view parameters, which is especially efficient in scenarios requiring frequently interactions. Experimental results demonstrate that the performance of our framework outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.

Since time and space play import roles in the research about KR (Knowledge Representation), spatial-temporal reasoning becomes one hot spot in knowledge reasoning. Ontology language is an excellent description language with which the knowledge can be well described. SPARQL can query knowledge in ontology, however, a few of them involve quantitative spatial-temporal relationships. In this paper, we choose event as research object and extend existing event model with time and space. We define 13 temporal relationships, 9 spatial azimuthal relationships and 8 spatial topological relationships quantitatively. Then, we extend SPARQL with 30 query operators, with which the certain relationship between two events can be calculated from property value of them. The experiment shows that, the SPARQL Extension with spatial-temporal quantitative query can effectively dig hidden relationships between entities in event ontology. Meanwhile, the effectiveness and performability are verified with this experiment.

The primary aim of this study was to assess the overall effectiveness of solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) among Chinese populations with mental and behavioral health issues. A random effects meta-analysis of nine eligible studies was conducted on SFBT outcomes in China. SFBT was effective in reducing internalizing problems, with effect sizes ranging from g = 0.49 to 3.22. Results from pooled effect size estimates favoring SFBT (g = 1.26) were large. These results highlight the positive impact SFBT has on Chinese clients with mental health-related problems. Implications for the use of SFBT among ethnic minority populations are discussed.

It is an important task to improve performance for sparse matrix vector multiplication (SpMV), and it is a difficult task because of its irregular memory access. General purpose GPU (GPGPU) provides high computing ability and substantial bandwidth that cannot be fully exploited by SpMV due to its irregularity. In this paper, we propose two novel methods to optimize the memory bandwidth for SpMV on GPGPU. First, a new storage format is proposed to exploit memory bandwidth of GPU architecture more efficiently. The new storage format can ensure that there are as many non-zeros as possible in the format which is suitable to exploit the memory bandwidth of the GPU. Second, we propose a cache blocking method to improve the performance of SpMV on GPU architecture. The sparse matrix is partitioned into sub-blocks that are stored in CSR format.With the blocking method, the corresponding part of vector x can be reused in the GPU cache, so the time to access the global memory for vector x is reduced heavily. Experiments are carried out on three GPU platforms, GeForce 9800 GX2, GeForce GTX 480, and Tesla K40. Experimental results show that both new methods can efficiently improve the utilization of GPU memory bandwidth and the performance of the GPU.

GPUs can provide powerful computing ability especially for data parallel applications, such as video/image processing applications. However, the complexity of GPU system makes the optimization of even a simple algorithm difficult. Different optimization methods on a GPU often lead to different performances. The matrix–vector multiplication routine for general dense matrices (GEMV) is an important kernel in video/image processing applications. We find that the implementations of GEMV in CUBLAS or MAGMA are not efficient, especially for small or fat matrix. In this paper, we propose a novel register blocking method to optimize GEMV on GPU architecture. This new method has three advantages. First, instead of using only one thread, we use a warp to compute an element of vector y so that the method can exploit the highly parallel GPU architecture. Second, the register blocking method is used to reduce the requirement of off-chip memory bandwidth. At last, the memory access order is elaborately arranged for the threads in one warp so that coalesced memory access is ensured. The proposed optimization methods for GEMV are comprehensively evaluated on different matrix sizes. The performance of the register blocking method with different block sizes is also evaluated in the experiment. Experiment results show that the new method can achieve very high speedup for small square matrices and fat matrices compared to CUBLAS or MAGMA, and can also achieve higher performance for large square matrices.

The main direction of human body is introduced in order to cope with various human poses.We propose three novel kinds of features, i.e., color features, shape features and statistical features.We try to address the suit detection issue for images of people in unconstrained environments. Clothing style analysis is a critical step for understanding images of people. To automatically identify the style of clothing that people wear is a challenging task due to various poses of person and large variations for even the same clothing category. Suit as one of the clothing style is a key element in many important activities. In this paper, we propose a novel suits detection method for images of people in unconstrained environments. In order to cope with various human poses, human pose estimation is incorporated. By analyzing the style of clothing, we propose the color features, shape features and statistical features for suits detection. Experiments with four popular classifiers have been conducted to demonstrate that the proposed features are effective and robust. Comparative experiments with Bag of Words (BoW) method demonstrate that the proposed features are superior to BoW which is a popular method for object detection. The proposed method has achieved promising performance over our dataset, which is a challenging web image set with various human poses and diverse styles of clothing.

A recent genetic linkage map was employed to detect quantitative trait loci (QTLs) associated with Vibrio anguillarum resistance in Japanese flounder. An F1 family established and challenged with V. anguillarum in 2009 was used for QTL mapping. Of the 221 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers used to detect polymorphisms in the parents of F1, 170 were confirmed to be polymorphic. The average distance between the markers was 10.6 cM. Equal amounts of genomic DNA from 15 fry that died early and from 15 survivors were pooled separately to constitute susceptible bulk and resistance bulk DNA. Bulked segregant analysis and QTL mapping were combined to detect candidate SSR markers and regions associated with the disease. A genome scan identified four polymorphic SSR markers, two of which were significantly different between susceptible and resistance bulk (P=0.008). These two markers were located in linkage group (LG) 7; therefore, all the SSR markers in LG7 were genotyped in all the challenged fry by single marker analysis. Using two different models, 11-17 SSR markers were detected with different levels of significance. To confirm the associations of these markers with the disease, composite interval mapping was employed to genotype all the challenged individuals. One and three QTLs, which explained more than 60 % of the phenotypic variance, were detected by the two models. Two of the QTLs were located at 48.6 cM. The common QTL may therefore be a major candidate region for disease resistance against V. anguillarum infection.

Although the number of knowledge bases in Linked Open Data has grown explosively, there are few knowledge bases about emergency, an important issue in the area of social management. In this paper, we introduce a semantic knowledge base of emergency, extracted from an authoritative website. According to the characteristics of the website, a framework is suggested to convert web into RDF. In order to help researchers acquire more knowledge, we follow the publishing rules of Linked Open Data—not only using URIs to label the objects in the semantic knowledge base, but also providing links to DBpedia. Finally, we employ Sesame to store and publish the semantic knowledge base, and develop a query interface to retrieve the knowledge base with SPARQL.

Polluted water is very common in our world. Vividly rendering polluted water can bring people real, different, and fancy feelings. Especially in under water imagery, taking polluted water into consideration will produce more plausible results. Polluted water consists of many kinds of pollutants, which interact with light differently and make water look turbid. The optical properties of polluted water change with the concentrations of pollutants significantly. In this paper, we provide a method to obtain the optical properties of polluted water, which makes a bio-optical model for polluted water and connects the optical parameters with water quality data, i.e., the concentrations of pollutants. Our method can estimate the optical properties of polluted water regardless of the kinds and the concentrations of pollutants in water. Polluted water is inhomogeneous and has multiple scattering effects. We use volumetric photon mapping to render it and provide a 3D weight-varying radiance estimate method for the photon mapping. This radiance estimate method can compute high-frequency effects easily, which can show more details of the pollution process. Experiments demonstrate that our approach can generate polluted water effects unachievable by standard rendering methods.

Physically based rendering of scenes with volumetric illumination of flames remains a challenging problem due to the complexity of their heterogeneous radiative properties. Current bidirectional importance sampling strategies have been focusing on emissive light sources without anisotropic extinction. In this paper, we present an efficient importance sampling method for volumetric light sources with anisotropic extinction. According to the radiative properties of flames, we separate the computation of anisotropic extinction from the evaluation of illumination inside flames and utilize cluster-based hierarchies to rapidly estimate them. To exploit the coherence of radiative voxels, we also propose a new similarity metric to aggregate voxels into clusters. For each pixel to be shaded, we use these clusters to rapidly approximate the importance function of voxels, and draw final illumination samples from clusters. Our results show that this approach substantially reduces the variance of images when rendering scenes with flames.

It is still an open problem to reuse the motion capture data in an intuitive way. In this paper, we present a novel technology to synthesize animations from the low-dimensional semantic signals. The semantic signals are defined as the meanings which are visible to the animators, such as the angles of joints rotation around axis, the trajectories of joints, or other intuitive motion signals. A linear time-invariant system is used to model the relationship between the input semantic signals and the output human motions. Once the model parameters are estimated, the outputs of system can be effectively controlled by the inputs. Because the semantic signals can be intuitively sketched or modified by animators according to the general knowledge in everyday life, this may provide an intuitive tool for animators to create new animations from the existing data. Furthermore, a novel algorithm is also proposed to edit the semantic signals for creating the full body motions while considering the correlations among joints. This is different from the traditional methods which consider human joints as independent from each other.

A blend of chitosan and viscose rayon was investigated. A film was made from regenerating the blend of chitosan and viscose rayon. The film was characterized by various techniques, including Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The phase behavior of the blend is influenced by its composition with or without carboxymeth-ylated chitosan (CM-Cs). Characterization of the chitosan/viscose rayon (Cs/VR) blend by DSC and DMA suggests partial compatibility of chitosan with VR and lack of compatibility in the remaining cases. Results of the TEM show that the addition of CM-Cs into the blend can improve the compatibility of Cs with VR. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 67:1965–1972, 1998

A study on anomalous nuclear fusion reaction by using 10 kV pulsed high voltage discharge in deuterium was completed. During high voltage (HV) pulses no neutron signal was detected, but two peaks of gamma rays were detected. The energies of two gamma rays are at 425 and 870 keV, respectively. It might be explained as Pd-108* and Fe-56* excited by high energy charged particles de-exciting radiations. Neither neutron signal nor gamma signal was detected in the intervals between the pulses.

The process of screening and selecting cell lines for the production of biopharmaceuticals can be very labor intensive and may involve screening thousands of cells lines in order to select high yielding producers. We have developed an integrated automation system to increase efficiency and throughput for screening and selection during cell line development. The system was designed to automate three sequential assays: (i) high throughput ELISA to identify high producers; (ii) digital imaging of high producers, and (iii) selection and expansion of high producing cell lines.

Artificial neural network (ANN) can be used to process the digital image screen halftoning (DISH), designed to be adaptive to the local variation of image intensity based on the wavelet transform (WT) preprocessing of the local gradient at each pixel. Our preliminary digital simulation results have shown an improved multiresolution visual effect of the bi-level representation of a gray-scale image. An interesting device concept is to build a fast "WT chip" of order (N) with a smart "neurochip" for DISH applications, in order to achieve an nonuniformly enhanced dot matrix printing.

A new adaptive digital halftoning method is presented where the screen function is designed to be adaptive to the local variation of image intensity. Wavelet transform is used to extract the information of this variation by estimating the gradient at each pixel. Our initial experimental results have shown improved visual effect of the halftoned images.© (1993) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.