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Due to the large differences in the shape and scale of pedestrian targets in real-world scenarios, compared with traditional methods, which often have lower average accuracy in pedestrian detection, transformer-based networks with attention mechanisms have shown strong performance in the field of pedestrian detection. However, there are still some difficulties in multi-scale detection in dense scenes. In dense scenes, there are usually a large number of occluded or small-scale pedestrian targets, leading to a large number of false and missed detections, as well as a significant amount of computing resources. Additionally, accurate detection of all targets becomes extremely difficult when pedestrian targets overlap significantly. To address these issues, a dense scene multi-scale pedestrian detection algorithm based on shifted window attention is proposed. Using modified Swin blocks in backbone enables the network to extract more detailed features while reducing the heavy computational burden brought by attention mechanisms. To effectively solve the feature fusion problem, DyHead blocks are used in the neck to unify multiple attention operations, thereby improving feature fusion efficiency. To address the feature balance issue, a feature scale-equalizing module based on full connection is designed, which constructs different residual structures between various levels of the feature pyramid to balance features and assist the model in generating higher-quality feature maps. Experimental results on the WiderPerson dataset show that this algorithm improves AP value by 1.1 percentage points, with 1.0 and 0.7 percentage points improvement in the most important small and medium targets, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Chinese Journal of Contemporary Pediatrics is the property of Xiangya Medical Periodical Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Weekend catch-up sleep (CUS) is a strategy commonly used to cope with insufficient sleep during weekdays. Previous studies focused more on the usefulness of CUS in compensating for the sleep loss on weekday nights, but might have overlooked its possible negative influence due to “social jet lag (SJL)” resulting from the changes in the sleep-wake schedule. Thus, this study aimed to fill this gap by exploring the effects of different weekend sleep patterns, with different degrees of CUS and SJL, on subsequent sleep and daytime functioning with an experimental design. The study included 69 young healthy adults as participants. They were randomly assigned to three groups: a “delayed weekend sleep schedule” group (G1: n = 20), a “delayed weekend sleep schedule + CUS” group (G2: n = 24), and a “delayed weekend rising schedule + CUS” group (G3: n = 25). All participants had to go through a two-week study period: a baseline week and an experimental week. During the baseline week, participants had to restrict their time in bed (TIB) to 7 hours each night; during the experimental week, they were required to follow a regular sleep schedule with a restricted TIB of 7 hours on weekday nights, and to follow one of three experimental sleep patterns on weekends. The weekend sleep pattern of G1 consists of no CUS and 2 hours of SJL; G2 was composed of 2 hours of CUS and 2 hours of SJL; G3 involved 2 hours of CUS and 1 hour of SJL. Upon awakening from the last nights of the baseline and experimental periods, each participant rated their subjective sleepiness on the Stanford Sleepiness Scale (SSS) and emotion on the Profile of Mood State (POMS), and then came to the laboratory to complete the Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT) and the Continuous Performance Test (CPT) on the following Monday morning. Those groups with CUS (G2 and G3) showed higher wake after sleep onset (WASO) on weekend nights in the experiment period than the baseline. G3, compared to the other two groups, showed a trend of decreased negative emotion after the experimental night. However, G1 and G2 showed increased negative emotion compared to their baseline. The findings suggest that CUS might not be a good coping strategy to compensate for insufficient sleep on weekdays. More CUS might lead to larger SJL, which was found to be related to elevated levels of negative mood. The possible compensatory effect of CUS might be cancelled out by the negative effect of SJL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Chinese Journal of Contemporary Pediatrics is the property of Xiangya Medical Periodical Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Taiwan has been enthusiastically learning elderly-care policies from abroad, as its population is rapidly aging. It has even drafted a long-term care insurance (LTCI) bill--following what super-aged countries like Germany and Japan did decades ago. While Germany chose "cash benefits," Japan opted for "service-only," owing to feminist groups' opposition. When Taiwan attempted to adopt the German LTCI model, feminist, labor, and elderly advocacy groups criticized the government intensely. They worried that if cash payments were available, most Taiwanese would opt for them, rendering no alleviation of burdens on family caregivers--mostly women. During Taiwan's legislative debates, however, there seemed to be little discussion on the program characteristics and consequences of the original German cash benefits. The present study sets out to explore this phenomenon systematically and finds significant differences and omissions exist in the knowledge about the German LTCI between the scholarly literature published in Chinese and English languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]