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Psoriasis is a common chronic immune-mediated inflammatory skin disease with the association of various comorbidities. Despite the introduction of highly effective biologic therapies over the past few decades, the exact trigger for an immune reaction in psoriasis is unclear. With the majority of immune cells residing in the gut, the effect of gut microbiome dysbiosis goes beyond the gastrointestinal site and may exacerbate inflammation and regulate the immune system elsewhere, including but not limited to the skin via the gut-skin axis. In order to delineate the role of the gut microbiome in Southern Chinese psoriasis patients, we performed targeted 16S rRNA sequencing and comprehensive bioinformatic analysis to compare the gut microbiome profile of 58 psoriasis patients against 49 healthy local subjects presumably with similar lifestyles. Blautia wexlerae and Parabacteroides distasonis were found to be enriched in psoriasis patients and in some of the healthy subjects, respectively. Metabolic functional pathways were predicted to be differentially abundant, with a clear shift toward SCFA synthesis in healthy subjects. The alteration of the co-occurrence network was also evident in the psoriasis group. In addition, we also profiled the gut microbiome in 52 of the 58 recruited psoriasis patients after taking 8 weeks of an orally administrated novel E3 probiotics formula (with prebiotics, probiotics and postbiotics). The Dermatological Life Quality Index (p = 0.009) and Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (p < 0.001) were significantly improved after taking 8 weeks of probiotics with no adverse effect observed. We showed that probiotics could at least partly restore gut dysbiosis via the modulation of the gut microbiome. Here, we also report the potential application of a machine learning-derived gut dysbiosis index based on a quantitative PCR panel (AUC = 0.88) to monitor gut dysbiosis in psoriasis patients. To sum up, our study suggests the gut microbial landscape differed in psoriasis patients at the genera, species, functional and network levels. Additionally, the dysbiosis index could be a cost-effective and rapid tool to monitor probiotics use in psoriasis patients.

The water level is a critical hydraulic parameter for inland ship safe navigation, as well as an important variable in inland waterway transport minoring and assistant systems. As a basic and traditional method, the one-dimensional (1D) hydrodynamic model is adapted to simulate river sections/waterway segments to obtain water levels numerically. However, the friction factor, i.e., Manning’s coefficient n, is a sensitive parameter for the traditional 1D hydrodynamic model. Its calibration or identification is not only very time-consuming but also unpractical. Due to its sensitivity to the simulation results, usually, one identified parameter cannot be adopted into other flow scenarios. It has been concluded that the unfitness of the traditional empirical quasi-steady friction formulae leads to these consequences/phenomena. Besides finding advanced parameter calibration algorithms and updating friction parameters dynamically, employing a true unsteady friction formula to replace the quasi-steady friction formula is a thorough solution to the problem. In this study, we introduced a newly proposed 1D unsteady friction formula to the momentum equation of the Saint-Venant Equations, thus a modified 1D hydrodynamic model was developed. To validate its capability in simulating water levels, the modified model was adopted into the Xia-la-xian – La-he-lian section of Daying River; and compared with the traditional model with the Manning formula. Results showed that the modified hydrodynamic model performs better in both water level and cross-sectional average velocity simulation. The research results can be used to support the construction of intelligent water level warning systems, intelligent shipping, and digital waterway transportation platforms.

Aim: we sought to estimate the association between hypoglycemic medications especially sodium-glucose co-transporter-2 inhibitors (SGLT2i) and osteomyelitis based on the FDA adverse event reporting system (FAERS). Methods: Publicly available FAERS data were analyzed using reporting odd ratio (ROR) method and Bayesian confidence propagation neural network (BCPNN) method. The developing trend of ROR were revealed by series of calculation based on accumulating dataset quarter by quarter. Results: Ketoacidosis, infections, peripheral ischemia, renal impairment, inflammation including osteomyelitis might more likely to occur among SGLT2i users, especially canagliflozin. Osteomyelitis and cellulitis are AEs unique to canagliflozin. Among 2,888 osteomyelitis-related reports referring to glucose lowering medications, 2,333 cases were associated with SGLT2i, mostly with canagliflozin counting 2,283 which generated an ROR value of 360.89 and a lower limit of information component (IC025) of 7.79. No BCPNN-positive signal could be generated for drugs other than insulin, canagliflozin or drug groups excluding canagliflozin. Reports referring to insulin could generate BCPNN-positive signals during the entire timespan from 2004 to 2021, while BCPNN-positive signal emerged since second quarter (Q2) of 2017, four years since the approval of SGLT2i in Q2 of 2013, for canagliflozin and drug groups containing canagliflozin. Conclusion: This data mining revealed that strong association between canagliflozin treatment and developing osteomyelitis which might be a precursor to lower extremity amputation. Further study with updated data is needed to better characterize the risk of osteomyelitis associated with SGLT2i.

BACKGROUND: In recent years, several tracker systems have been developed to monitor a 3-dimensional skull position for facial action whereas, various tracker systems simultaneously analyze the single sequence of video, which can be provided with low-quality cameras and less security. Initially, implementing a 2-D face detector and an unrepentance system has been suggested; furthermore, it has been improved using an integrated 3-D face initialized scheme for the real-time tracker in the present face recognition systems. OBJECTIVES: To overcome the present setbacks of the conventional systems, Face Pose Detection assisted controlled FACE++ tool position of Three-Dimensional Robot (FPLF3D) has been proposed in this article. Furthermore, the suggested proposed configuration has a high-end monitoring approach, which is used to improve the reliability of the robot’s human-machine contact in the workplace environment for security assistance. Additionally, the robot’s direction can be controlled by the operator’s head position assessment of the camera (or any active viewing system) using a three-dimensional robot. RESULTS: Besides, the applications that are imitated by headers like telepresence, computer-generated reality, and video competitions will directly take advantage of the strategies introduced in this paper. CONCLUSION: Finally, real video tests at the lab-scale level show the accuracy and usefulness of the approaches proposed in this research outperform the existing methods used for tracking.

The transition from traditional agriculture to tunnel farming is expected to be beneficial for the environment, leading to increased productivity and lower CO2 emissions per unit of rice. However, it is unclear whether the benefits will outweigh the additional costs of this method. To evaluate this issue, we make a cost-effectiveness analysis using a lifecycle approach in which farm management costs are equated with environmental damages due to nitrogen leaching and soil degradation. The benefits of tunnel farming are found to exceed its additional costs by up to 89 percent when comparing long-run production levels between two simulations: one including fertilisation, pollution control equipment and other inputs for traditional agriculture; one including all inputs necessary for tunnel farming.

Imbalance of the immune system caused by alterations of gut microbiome is considered to be a critical factor in the pathogenesis of infant eczema but the exact role of the gut microbiome in adult atopic dermatitis (AD) patients remains to be clarified. To investigate the differences of the gut microbiome between adult AD patients and healthy individuals, stool samples of 234 adults, containing 104 AD patients and 130 healthy subjects were collected for amplicon sequencing. Altered structure and metabolic dysfunctions of the gut microbiome were identified in adult AD patients. Our results illustrated that the adult AD patients were more likely to have allergies, particularly non-food allergies. And the gut microbiome composition of the AD and normal groups were considerably different. Besides, Romboutsia and Clostridium_sensu_stricto_1 was enriched in the normal group, whereas Blautia, Butyricicoccus, Lachnoclostridium, Eubacterium_hallii_group, Erysipelatoclostridium, Megasphaera, Oscillibacter, Flavonifractor were dominated in the AD group. Moreover, purine nucleotide degradation pathways were significantly enriched in the AD group and the enrichment of proteinogenic amino acid biosynthesis pathways was found in the normal group. This study provides insights into new therapeutic strategies targeting the gut microbiome for AD and evidence for the involvement of gut-skin axis in AD patients.

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Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) continues to pose an enormous threat to economic activity and public health worldwide. Previous studies have shown that the nonstructural protein 5 (nsp5, also called 3C-like protease) of alpha- and deltacoronaviruses cleaves Q231 of the NF-κB essential modulator (NEMO), a key kinase in the RIG-I-like receptor pathway, to inhibit type I interferon (IFN) production. In this study, we found that both SARS-CoV-2 nsp5 and SARS-CoV nsp5 cleaved NEMO at multiple sites (E152, Q205, and Q231). Notably, SARS-CoV-2 nsp5 exhibited a stronger ability to cleave NEMO than SARS-CoV nsp5. Sequence and structural alignments suggested that an S/A polymorphism at position 46 of nsp5 in SARS-CoV versus SARS-CoV-2 may be responsible for this difference. Mutagenesis experiments showed that SARS-CoV-2 nsp5 (S46A) exhibited poorer cleavage of NEMO than SARS-CoV-2 nsp5 wild type (WT), while SARS-CoV nsp5 (A46S) showed enhanced NEMO cleavage compared with the WT protein. Purified recombinant SARS-CoV-2 nsp5 WT and SARS-CoV nsp5 (A46S) proteins exhibited higher hydrolysis efficiencies than SARS-CoV-2 nsp5 (S46A) and SARS-CoV nsp5 WT proteins

Recent studies indicate that bow foil biomimetic systems can significantly improve ship propulsion in waves. In this paper, the DTMB 5415 ship model is taken as the object and a semi-active elastic flapping foil is proposed to install at its bow underwater position. When a ship sails in head wave, heave and pitch motion will occur, which will drive the bow foil to form heave motion. According to the working characteristics of elastic foil, bow foil can generate forward thrust under drive of given heave motion. At first, co-simulation of the ship with self-pitching bow foil in head waves is realized by ISIS-CFD solver and preliminarily realizes drag reduction and thrust increase effect of the bow foil. At the same time, it is found that the effect of bow foil on hull drag reduction is reflected in two aspects, one is the additional thrust generated by the bow foil and the other is that suppression of the bow foil on hull motion also reduces hull resistance in waves. Then, in order to optimize the working characteristics of elastic bow foil, the influence of spring stiffness and span length of the bow foil on drag reduction and thrust increase effect is discussed. A preliminary spring optimization result is obtained, as well as the influence of the span length of the bow foil on the system.

The semi-active flapping foil driven by the swing arm is a simple structure to realize the propulsion of the flapping foil. The motion trajectory of this semi-active flapping foil mechanism is a circular arc, and its hydrodynamic characteristics are not clear. This paper systematically investigates the working characteristics and hydrodynamic performance of this semi-active flapping foil with a circular arc track. Compared with the traditional flapping foil structure, the special design parameters of the semi-active flapping foil driven by the swing arm mainly include the length of the swing arm and the stiffness of the torsion spring. In this paper, the three-dimensional fluid-structure coupling method is used by solving the fluid dynamics equation and the structural dynamics equation, and the working characteristics of the structure with different motion and geometric parameters are analyzed. From the results, increasing the swing arm length is beneficial to improving the peak efficiency of the flapping foil, and also to improving the thrust coefficient corresponding to the peak efficiency point. Under a certain swing arm length, reducing the spring stiffness is also conducive to improving the peak efficiency of the propulsion system, but it is adverse to the thrust coefficient. Further analysis shows that the maximum angle of attack is the key factor affecting the efficiency of this flapping foil propulsion. For the flapping foil described in this paper, its peak efficiency is usually concentrated near αmax=0.2 rad. However, for the thrust coefficient of this kind of flapping foil propulsion, the influencing factors are relatively complex, including swinging arm, the spring stiffness, and the advance coefficient. The maximum angle of attack remains the key factor affecting the peak thrust in the range of advance coefficient far from the starting state.

Engineered rubber vulcanizates may contain a low content of short fibers and a high content of nanoparticles while the effects of the different fillers on the softening behavior are not yet explored. Herein, influences of carbon black (CB) and short aramid fiber (AF) on the Payne and Mullins effects of natural rubber composites are investigated for the first time by creating master curves of dynamic modulus or dissipation energy with respect to the straining responses of the matrix. It is revealed that the composite vulcanizates demonstrate the Payne effect characterized by decay of storage modulus, weak overshoot of loss modulus, and very weak high-order harmonics; this effect is mainly dominated by the rubber matrix experiencing microscopic strain amplitude enlarged by the filler. The composite vulcanizates exhibit the Mullins effect that becomes increasingly marked with increasing filler loading and is partially recovered by thermal annealing at relatively high temperatures. The energy dissipation during cyclic tensions is rooted in the viscoelastic deformation of the matrix and the filler-rubber interfacial debonding. The former is marked at room temperature where the rubber phase undergoes a crystallization-melting process during loading-unloading. The latter being marked in the presence of a small content of AF causes yieldinglike deformation for the virgin composites at low tensile strains, and its contribution to the softening is not recoverable during thermal annealing. The results show that the viscoelastic matrix is of importance in controlling the softening of the composite vulcanizates, which will be of guiding significance to conduct research studies on high-performance rubber composites products.

This paper researched into the harmonic and anharmonic underwater flapping foil propulsion systems to improve the efficiency of these bioinspired propulsors. The angle of attack, the pitching angle, the heaving amplitude, and the phase difference are parametrically investigated in this paper. A rigid two-dimensional NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) 0012 airfoil is modeled with the aid of a commercial computational fluid dynamics software, FINE™/Marine. Unsteady Reynolds Average Navier-Stokes (URANS) equation is solved together with dynamic mesh to simulate the foil motion. The investigation first verifies the reliability of the developed modeling method against the benchmark data. Then, the systematic investigation is conducted and identifies that the heaving amplitude is most influential factor for the propulsion efficiency. Secondly, phase difference also has a significant influence on efficiency, but this effect is related to the reference working condition, which needs further study. Then, the pitching amplitude has little effect on the maximum efficiency value of flapping foil, while it will affect its optimal speed range. When the heaving amplitude ratio reaches 3 and the corresponding maximum angle of attack is about 9°, the maximum efficiency can reach 87%. The effect of anharmonic motion on the efficiency is very small and varies with the St number, but in summary, it can maintain the peak efficiency over a wider range of operations. In addition, the force and flow field characteristics of different efficiency points are compared and analyzed to distinguish their corresponding relationship with the propulsion efficiency.

It has been observed in literature that for unsteady flow conditions the one-to-one relationships between flow depth, cross-sectional averaged velocity, and frictional resistance as determined from steady uniform flow cases may not be appropriate for these more complex flow systems. Thus, a general friction resistance formula needs to be modified through the addition of new descriptive terms to account for flow unsteadiness, in order to eliminate errors due to uniform and steady-flow assumptions. An extended Chezy formula incorporating both time and space partial derivatives of hydraulic parameters was developed using dimensional analysis to investigate the relationship between flow unsteadiness and friction resistance. Results show that the proposed formula performs better than the traditional Chezy formula for simulating real hydrograph cases whereby both formula coefficients are individually identified for each flood event and coefficients are predetermined using other flood events as calibration cases. Although the extended Chezy formula as well as the original Chezy formula perform worse with the increasing degree of flow unsteadiness, its results are less dramatically affected by unsteadiness intensity, thereby improving estimations of flood routing. As a result, it tends to perform much better than traditional Chezy formula for severe flood events. Under more complex conditions whereby peak flooding events may occur predominantly under unsteady flow, the extended Chezy model may provide as a valuable tool for researchers, practitioners, and water managers for assessing and predicting impacts for flooding and for the development of more appropriate mitigation strategies and more accurate risk assessments.

The 3C-like protease (3CL(pro)) of nidovirus plays an important role in viral replication and manipulation of host antiviral innate immunity, which makes it an ideal antiviral target. Here, we characterized that porcine torovirus (PToV; family Tobaniviridae, order Nidovirales) 3CL(pro) autocatalytically releases itself from the viral precursor protein by self-cleavage. Site-directed mutagenesis suggested that PToV 3CL(pro), as a serine protease, employed His53 and Ser160 as the active-site residues. Interestingly, unlike most nidovirus 3CL(pro), the P1 residue plays a less essential role in N-terminal self-cleavage of PToV 3CL(pro). Substituting either P1 or P4 residue of substrate alone has little discernible effect on N-terminal cleavage. Notably, replacement of the two residues together completely blocks N-terminal cleavage, suggesting that N-terminal self-cleavage of PToV 3CL(pro) is synergistically affected by both P1 and P4 residues. Using a cyclized luciferase-based biosensor, we systematically scanned the polyproteins for cleavage sites and identified (FXXQ↓A/S) as the main consensus sequences. Subsequent homology modeling and biochemical experiments suggested that the protease formed putative pockets S1 and S4 between the substrate. Indeed, mutants of both predicted S1 (D159A, H174A) and S4 (P62G/L185G) pockets completely lost the ability of cleavage activity of PToV 3CL(pro). In conclusion, the characterization of self-processing activities and substrate specificities of PToV 3CL(pro) will offer helpful information for the mechanism of nidovirus 3C-like proteinase’s substrate specificities and the rational development of the antinidovirus drugs. IMPORTANCE Currently, the active-site residues and substrate specificities of 3C-like protease (3CL(pro)) differ among nidoviruses, and the detailed catalytic mechanism remains largely unknown. Here, porcine torovirus (PToV) 3CL(pro) cleaves 12 sites in the polyproteins, including its N- and C-terminal self-processing sites. Unlike coronaviruses and arteriviruses, PToV 3CL(pro) employed His53 and Ser160 as the active-site residues that recognize a glutamine (Gln) at the P1 position. Surprisingly, mutations of P1-Gln impaired the C-terminal self-processing but did not affect N-terminal self-processing. The “noncanonical” substrate specificity for its N-terminal self-processing was attributed to the phenylalanine (Phe) residue at the P4 position in the N-terminal site. Furthermore, a double glycine (neutral) substitution at the putative P4-Phe-binding residues (P62G/L185G) abolished the cleavage activity of PToV 3CL(pro) suggested the potential hydrophobic force between the PToV 3CL(pro) and P4-Phe side chains.

Person re-identification(re-ID) is becoming a hot research topic because of its value in both machine learning and video surveillance applications. In order to improve the robustness of Metric Learning by Accelerated Proximal Gradient(MLAPG), a person re-ID algorithm, called Asymmetric -MLAPG, is proposed on the basis of asymmetric metric. Unlike traditional metric learning which ignores the taking environment of the person images, asymmetric metric learning aims to find the feature matrix of each camera and map the vectors of images to a common space. In this paper, we rebuilt MLAPG model by Asymmetric metric. In addition to adding a regularization term which controls the influence of inconsistency of metric, there are two more regularization terms in order to control the offset of feature matrix from the initial value. Experiments show that the Asymmetric -MLAPG algorithm can achieve the better recognition rate and wide applicability on commonly used person re-ID data sets.

Hepatitis A is an acute infection caused by Hepatitis A virus (HAV), which is widely distributed throughout the world. The HAV 3C cysteine protease (3Cpro), an important nonstructural protein, is responsible for most cleavage within the viral polyprotein and is critical for the processes of viral replication. Our group has previously demonstrated that HAV 3Cpro cleaves human NF-κB essential modulator (NEMO), a kinase required in interferon signaling. Based on this finding, we generated four luciferase-based biosensors containing the NEMO sequence (PVLKAQ↓ADIYKA) that is cleaved by HAV 3Cpro and/or the Nostoc punctiforme DnaE intein, to monitor the activity of HAV 3Cpro in human embryonic kidney cells (HEK-293T). Western blotting showed that HAV 3Cpro recognized and cleaved the NEMO cleavage sequence incorporated in the four biosensors, whereas only one cyclized luciferase-based biosensor (233-DnaE-HAV, 233DH) showed a measurable and reliable increase in firefly luciferase activity, with very low background, in the presence of HAV 3Cpro. With this biosensor (233DH), we monitored HAV 3Cpro activity in HEK-293T cells, and tested it against a catalytically deficient mutant HAV 3Cpro and other virus-encoded proteases. The results showed that the activity of this luciferase biosensor is specifically dependent on HAV 3Cpro. Collectively, our data demonstrate that the luciferase biosensor developed here might provide a rapid, sensitive, and efficient evaluation of HAV 3Cpro activity, and should extend our better understanding of the biological relevance of HAV 3Cpro., Highlights • Four luciferase-based biosensors were generated to monitor the activity of HAV 3Cpro. • The cyclized luciferase-based biosensor 233DH showed measurable and reliable data. • Luciferase activity of 233DH was specifically dependent on HAV 3Cpro activity. • 233DH was only recognized and cleaved by HAV 3Cpro but by no other viral 3CLpro.

With the gradual usage of carbon dots (CDs) in the area of antiviral research, attempts have been stepped up to develop new antiviral CDs with high biocompatibility and antiviral effects. In this study, a kind of highly biocompatible CDs (Gly‐CDs) is synthesized from active ingredient (glycyrrhizic acid) of Chinese herbal medicine by a hydrothermal method. Using the porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) as a model, it is found that the Gly‐CDs inhibit PRRSV proliferation by up to 5 orders of viral titers. Detailed investigations reveal that Gly‐CDs can inhibit PRRSV invasion and replication, stimulate antiviral innate immune responses, and inhibit the accumulation of intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) caused by PRRSV infection. Proteomics analysis demonstrates that Gly‐CDs can stimulate cells to regulate the expression of some host restriction factors, including DDX53 and NOS3, which are directly related to PRRSV proliferation. Moreover, it is found that Gly‐CDs also remarkably suppress the propagation of other viruses, such as pseudorabies virus (PRV) and porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV), suggesting the broad antiviral activity of Gly‐CDs. The integrated results demonstrate that Gly‐CDs possess extraordinary antiviral activity with multisite inhibition mechanisms, providing a promising candidate for alternative therapy for PRRSV infection., Glycyrrhizic‐acid‐based carbon dots with excellent biocompatibility are prepared and used to inhibit porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) proliferation by up to 5 orders of viral titers. Further investigations reveal as‐prepared carbon dots can inhibit invasion and replication of PRRSV by stimulating antiviral innate immune responses, inhibiting the accumulation of intracellular reactive oxygen species and stimulating production of some host restriction factors.

In the last decade, a cross-national community of like-minded young men has emerged, commonly known as 'the seduction community'. This community is led by professional 'pick-up artists' who teach these young men a variety of techniques and mindsets with the stated aim of improving their success with women, or 'game'. There has been little research on the men who participate in this community, and none from a mental health angle. As such, this study is propelled by two specific objectives, namely documenting and understanding (i) the reasons why young men join the seduction community; and (ii) the impacts of community involvement on participants' lives. To meet these aims, we used an inductive qualitative methodology giving ample scope for bottom-up understandings to emerge. Specifically, we recruited young men participating in the seduction community for an in-depth qualitative interview (N = 34) to explore self-reported motives and impacts. Interviews were augmented by lengthy participant observation, and data was analyzed by content analysis techniques. The results reveal that men often join the community to address a range of psychosocial deficits, and that community involvement successfully equips participants with numerous valued social and communication skills. The community appears to fill a void in providing a place of hope, fellowship and learning for young (often immigrant) men. The findings are summarized in five themes (i) loneliness and social inclusion; (ii) lack of male role models and need for guidance; (iii) mental health and well-being issues; (iv) skill acquisition and personal development; and (v) the dark side of pick-up. Interestingly, some of the practices commonly taught and utilized within the community resemble aspects of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and mental health peer support. This may explain its evident appeal. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of the findings for official mental health service provision for young men.

Coronaviruses (CoVs) infect humans and multiple other animal species, causing highly prevalent and severe diseases. 3C-like proteases (3CLpros) from CoVs (also called main proteases) are essential ...

Myocardial infarction is due to lasting and serious myocardial ischemic that leads to myocardial necrosis and cardiac remodeling, and can consequently results in heart failure. Traditional treatment for myocardial infarction includes drug therapy, thrombolytic therapy, percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), and coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. Although these treatments can to some extent relieve the symptom of myocardial ischemia, they fail to repair the necrotic heart tissues. Myocardial regeneration is undoubtedly the best solution to the clinical problems of myocardial infarction treatment. The review briefly illustrated the pros and cons of the traditional treatments of myocardial infarction, and focused on the application of new strategies for myocardial infarction treatment using myocardial regeneration.

Recently, a local binary patterns-based initialization scheme for robust cascaded pose regression was proposed, which selects the most correlated shapes with the estimated face from training set as the initial shapes. Nevertheless, due to the massive samples in training set, the operation of selecting the most correlated shapes with the estimated shape turns out to be time-consuming. To reduce the quantity of the faces in training set for correlation analyzing in the training set, the faces should be divided into latent classes, and a face in each class could be chosen to form a smaller initial shape pool. In this paper, we view the faces and the latent classes as the latent Dirichlet allocation model. We first extract scale-invariant feature transform features from each face and employ $k$ -means algorithm on the features to obtain a fixed number of clusters. The features in each cluster are represented by its centroid, which can be used to generate the probability distribution of a face belonging to the latent classes via Gibbs sampling. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated on the challenging data set of Caltech Occluded Faces in the Wild. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce time cost on landmark localization by 65.84% without dropping accuracy.

Slepian-Wolf problem regards the compression of multiple correlated information sources that do not communicate with each other. In real applications, the information sources such as video sequences are usually with memory where they are interdependent between symbols. Existing researches mainly consider the memoryless sources and employ channel coding to solve the Slepian-Wolf problem. In this paper, we use distributed arithmetic coding instead of channel coding to solve the Slepian-Wolf problem, benefiting the advantages of source coding in memory sources by eliminating redundancy between symbols. The proposed scheme is very competitive comparing to the existing schemes when applied to memory sources. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has performance gains when applied to the first-order memory sources with the different overlapping factor. We also analyzed the performance applied to the second-order memory sources with different block lengths.

Background To determine the effect of different dietary interventions on health outcomes in the Hong Kong East Asian population. Methods 38 overweight or obese (BMI >23 kg/m2) East Asian subjects (25 to 60 years of age, 19 males, 19 females) from Hong Kong were recruited as part of a randomised controlled clinical trial. People with major pulmonary, cardiovascular, hepatic, gastrointestinal or renal diseases, metabolic syndrome or recent antibiotic use were excluded. All subjects were randomly assigned four diet groups, 1) Diet as usual (control), 2) Unsaturated fatty acid diet (UFA), 3) Whole grain diet (WG), 4) Mixed intervention of 2nd and 3rd diets (MIX). Interventions were provided by a registered dietitian. A separate dietitian who was blinded monitored the compliance to the assigned diet type by visual assessment of food consumption. To determine the health outcomes, physical examination, blood pressure, blood glucose and serum cholesterol were assessed at the body check centre at week 0 (baseline), 1, 4 and 8. Dietary interventions were compared with controls using t-test. Results A total of 38 subjects observed throughout the 8 weeks, 11 subjects were randomly allocated to WG group, 10 to PUFA, 8 to MIX and 7 to the control group. Across all 4 diet groups, overall compliance was 25%, with an 11% increase at week 8 compared to baseline. Compliance to dietary intervention had a favourable effect on total and LDL cholesterol levels. A negative correlation between compliance change versus total and LDL cholesterol change at week 8 compared to baseline were observed (r=−0.4, r=−0.41 respectively). Compared to controls, a significant reduction of systolic blood pressure by 8th week was observed in UFA group (p=0.0048), unremarkable in other groups. A trend towards significant reduction of triglycerides was observed by 8th week (p=0.059) in WG group compared to controls. Both MIX and WG groups showed a trend towards reduction of total cholesterol (p=0.09 and p=0.05 respectively). Conclusions Effect of dietary intervention on health depends on the specific interventions. High unsaturated fatty acid diet has a favourable effect on reducing systolic blood pressure.