A. Skinner, Sophie N Ravanbakht, J. Skelton
et al.
This is a secondary data analysis of a nationally representative sample of US youth in which we report on current obesity prevalence trends through 2016. OBJECTIVES: To provide updated prevalence data on obesity trends among US children and adolescents aged 2 to 19 years from a nationally representative sample. METHODS: We used the NHANES for years 1999 to 2016. Weight status was determined by using measured height and weight from the physical examination component of the NHANES to calculate age- and sex-specific BMI. We report the prevalence estimates of overweight and obesity (class I, class II, and class III) by 2-year NHANES cycles and compared cycles by using adjusted Wald tests and linear trends by using ordinary least squares regression. RESULTS: White and Asian American children have significantly lower rates of obesity than African American children, Hispanic children, or children of other races. We report a positive linear trend for all definitions of overweight and obesity among children 2–19 years old, most prominently among adolescents. Children aged 2 to 5 years showed a sharp increase in obesity prevalence from 2015 to 2016 compared with the previous cycle. CONCLUSIONS: Despite previous reports that obesity in children and adolescents has remained stable or decreased in recent years, we found no evidence of a decline in obesity prevalence at any age. In contrast, we report a significant increase in severe obesity among children aged 2 to 5 years since the 2013–2014 cycle, a trend that continued upward for many subgroups.
Facial expression is central to human experience, but most previous databases and studies are limited to posed facial behavior under controlled conditions. In this paper, we present a novel facial expression database, Real-world Affective Face Database (RAF-DB), which contains approximately 30 000 facial images with uncontrolled poses and illumination from thousands of individuals of diverse ages and races. During the crowdsourcing annotation, each image is independently labeled by approximately 40 annotators. An expectation–maximization algorithm is developed to reliably estimate the emotion labels, which reveals that real-world faces often express compound or even mixture emotions. A cross-database study between RAF-DB and CK+ database further indicates that the action units of real-world emotions are much more diverse than, or even deviate from, those of laboratory-controlled emotions. To address the recognition of multi-modal expressions in the wild, we propose a new deep locality-preserving convolutional neural network (DLP-CNN) method that aims to enhance the discriminative power of deep features by preserving the locality closeness while maximizing the inter-class scatter. Benchmark experiments on 7-class basic expressions and 11-class compound expressions, as well as additional experiments on CK+, MMI, and SFEW 2.0 databases, show that the proposed DLP-CNN outperforms the state-of-the-art handcrafted features and deep learning-based methods for expression recognition in the wild. To promote further study, we have made the RAF database, benchmarks, and descriptor encodings publicly available to the research community.
The primary drivers of agricultural land depletion in Taiz be diagnosed quantitatively in this study, proposing for the first time a replicable conflict-sensitive urban management model. The overarching objective is to bridge the critical gap between sustainable urban expansion and the preservation of agro-ecological systems in fragile, data-scarce contexts. A combination of unplanned sprawl, crisis, and ineffective governance, Taiz City's rapid urbanization between 2000 and 2024 resulted in a 35% loss of agricultural land. This study proposes that governance reduces the primary causes of conflict escalation and the severity of sprawl. This study combines GIS spatial analysis (Landsat 8/9 and support vector machine classification), regression modeling, and global case comparisons (Medellín and Mumbai) to assess land-use trends. The findings indicate that governance diminishes the effects (β = −0.50, p < 0.01), sprawl (β = 0.85, p < 0.01), and conflict (β = 0.002, p < 0.05) explain 85% of the variance in losses. By 2024, 3.2 million residents' food security was at risk because of the urbanization of 60% of peri-urban fertile lands. Vertical expansion, tenure regularization and GIS planning will reclaim 20% of land by 2030.
Este relato de experiência teve como objetivo abordar questões de gênero, feminismo e direitos humanos, utilizando o livro Malala, a menina que queria ir para a escola, de Adriana Carranca (2018), com alunos do 7º ano do ensino fundamental em uma escola pública. A história da ativista paquistanesa Malala Yousafzai serviu como base para leitura, fichamento, tertúlia literária, produção de cartas motivacionais e discussões sobre igualdade de gênero, acesso à educação e dos direitos humanos. A metodologia adotou uma abordagem participativa, com o uso de recursos visuais, como vídeos, para ampliar a compreensão e o engajamento dos estudantes. O referencial teórico fundamentou-se nas perspectivas de Spivak (2010) e hooks (2017, 2021), dialogando com teorias feministas e documentos internacionais. O estudo dessa obra incentivou reflexões sobre desigualdade de gênero e educação equitativa, promovendo a desconstrução de estereótipos e o fortalecimento da consciência crítica dos estudantes. A experiência também estimulou o protagonismo juvenil na defesa dos direitos humanos e na promoção da cultura da paz, reforçando o papel da educação na construção de uma sociedade mais justa e igualitária.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Human settlements. Communities
Ludmila Cardoso Fagundes Mendes, Roberta Vieira Gonçalves de Souza, Danielly Marcianny Silva Eulário
É fundamental criar ambientes hospitalares acessíveis, acolhedores e confortáveis. Infere-se que arquitetos, designers e engenheiros exercem um papel crucial durante o ciclo de vida da edificação hospitalar. No entanto, entende-se que a participação dos demais usuários do ambiente hospitalar é importante também na idealização de mudanças no espaço físico. Esta pesquisa teve como objetivo, examinar a perspectiva de profissionais influentes no planejamento de edifícios hospitalares quanto à introdução de estímulos no ambiente físico. Indicadores de bem-estar foram selecionados a partir das Teorias do Design de Suporte e do Design Baseado em Evidências, tendo sido aplicado um questionário versando sobre Senso de Controle, Apoio Social, Distrações Positivas e Iluminação Natural. Participaram 96 arquitetos, designers, engenheiros, gestores hospitalares, médicos, enfermeiros e outros profissionais da área. As respostas indicaram que, para a maioria dos respondentes, o ambiente físico interfere muito no bem-estar de todos os tipos de usuário de Estabelecimentos Assistenciais de Saúde (EAS) sendo a presença de iluminação natural o componente considerado mais relevante para seu bem-estar. Segundo os profissionais, os indicadores de bem-estar têm relevância superior para pacientes internados em enfermarias e para funcionários da assistência em regime de plantão igual ou superior a 12h, e menor relevância para pacientes não internados. Preservar a privacidade dos pacientes e disponibilizar iluminação natural em quartos e em enfermarias foram os indicadores de bem-estar mais priorizados pelos participantes da pesquisa. De modo geral, os projetistas tendem a priorizar mais os indicadores em novas edificações de EAS do que em reformas ou ampliações.
Architecture, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Global climate change, one of the most important problems of today, and human activities have negative effects on the sustainability of natural resources. It has become necessary to establish planning and management mechanisms for the sustainable use of drinking water basins within the protection-use balance. Beyşehir Basin, Türkiye was chosen as the study area. The aim of this study is to present a new model approach for the use of Analytical Hierarchy Process and Geographic Information Systems, based on the unique topographic, hydrological, and environmental characteristics of the basin, in the determination of the drinking water basin protection zones. Thirteen criteria, which affect the reaching of the pollutants to the water surface and reflect the topographic, hydrological, and environmental characteristics of the basin, were used in the determination of the protection zones. As a result of the study, it was determined that 2.83% of the basin is in the absolute protection zone, 44.97% in the short-range protection zone, 35.93% in the medium-range protection zone and 16.26% in the long-range protection zone. In the last stage, the conservation areas determined by the current legal regulations for the basin and the protection zones determined by the model approach were spatially and areally compared. According to the results of the comparison, it was determined with the proposed protection model that the absolute protection, the short-range protection, and the medium-range protection zones increased areally, and the spatial distributions of these protection zones were shaped according to the structure of the basin.
We characterize the approximation spaces of a broad class of bases - which includes almost greedy bases - in terms of weighted Lorentz spaces. For those bases, we also find necessary and sufficient conditions under which the approximation spaces and greedy classes are the same.
In this paper, I report some investigation discussing team selection, whence hierarchy, through ranking indicators, for example when measuring professional cyclist team's sportive value, in particular in multistage races. A logical, it seems, constraint is introduced on the riders: they must finish the race. Several new indicators are defined, justified, and compared. These indicators are mainly based on the arriving place of (the best 3) riders instead of their time needed for finishing the stage or the race, - as presently classically used. A case study, serving as an illustration containing the necessary ingredients for a wider discussion, is the 2023 Vuelta de San Juan, but without loss of generality. It is shown that the new indicators offer some new viewpoint for distinguishing the ranking through the cumulative sums of the places of riders rather than their finishing times. On the other hand, the indicators indicate a different team hierarchy if only the finishing riders are considered. Some consideration on the distance between ranking indicators is presented. Moreover, it is argued that these new ranking indicators should hopefully promote more competitive races, not only till the end of the race, but also until the end of each stage. Generalizations and other applications within operational research topics, like in academia, are suggested.
Abdul Hakim Abd Jalil, Abdul Halim Abdullah, Mohd Hilmi Hamzah
Numerous studies have shown that the language barrier may cause the difficulties among indigenous children in learning mathematics. Apparently, this is also the case among the Orang Asli students in Malaysia. As enshrined in the Malaysian Constitution, the Malay language is the national language spoken by Malaysians who are made up of various races. However, other races including the Orang Asli are free to use their respective languages in their daily lives. In the Malaysian education system, the medium of instruction used in mathematics classes is the Malay language. Since the Orang Asli students are only exposed to the Malay language after they enter formal education in a primary school, the use of the Malay language has become an obstacle for them to understand mathematical concepts. Accordingly, this concept paper discusses the position of the Orang Asli language in Malaysia, the medium of teaching and learning in mathematics classes in Malaysia, and the effectiveness of using the Orang Asli language in mathematics classes among the Orang Asli students. In addition, the code-switching approach that is widely practised in many countries is also discussed. Finally, the roles of various parties, including the Ministry of Education, the Department of Orang Asli Development, NGOs, teachers, parents and the Orang Asli communities in increasing the use of the national language among the Orang Asli students are also discussed. It is hoped that this concept paper can enlighten the language problems among the Orang Asli students in Malaysia and further improve their academic quality.
Édouard Bonnet, Julien Duron, John Sylvester
et al.
A class of graphs admits an adjacency labeling scheme of size $b(n)$, if the vertices in each of its $n$-vertex graphs can be assigned binary strings (called labels) of length $b(n)$ so that the adjacency of two vertices can be determined solely from their labels. We give tight bounds on the size of adjacency labels for every family of monotone (i.e., subgraph-closed) classes with a well-behaved growth function between $2^{O(n \log n)}$ and $2^{O(n^{2-δ})}$ for any $δ> 0$. Specifically, we show that for any function $f: \mathbb N \to \mathbb R$ satisfying $\log n \leqslant f(n) \leqslant n^{1-δ}$ for any fixed $δ> 0$, and some~sub-multiplicativity condition, there are monotone graph classes with growth $2^{O(nf(n))}$ that do not admit adjacency labels of size at most $f(n) \log n$. On the other hand, any such class does admit adjacency labels of size $O(f(n)\log n)$. Surprisingly this tight bound is a $Θ(\log n)$ factor away from the information-theoretic bound of $Ω(f(n))$. The special case when $f = \log$ implies that the recently-refuted Implicit Graph Conjecture [Hatami and Hatami, FOCS 2022] also fails within monotone classes. We further show that the Implicit Graph Conjecture holds for all monotone \emph{small} classes. In other words, any monotone class with growth rate at most $n!\,c^n$ for some constant $c>0$, admits adjacency labels of information-theoretic order optimal size. In fact, we show a more general result that is of independent interest: any monotone small class of graphs has bounded degeneracy.We conjecture that the Implicit Graph Conjecture holds for all hereditary small classes.
Voluntary HIV counselling and testing (VHCT) is a successful intervention for fostering early HIV detection, which is essential for the management of the disease. This study sought to determine the prevalence and factors that influence the utilization of VHCT services among young people. In this study, young people in the Tema Metropolis were cross-sectionally surveyed. The simple random sampling method was used to select the participants. The majority (60%) of the participants were unaware of VHCT, and 83% did not know of any VHCT centre. The majority (72%) of the participants indicated that VHCT was important, and 81% were willing to test for HIV if VHCT services were available in schools. Young people who knew that parental consent was not a requirement during VHCT were about two times more likely to have been tested for HIV (COR = 1.96; 95% CI: 1.05–3.63) compared to their counterparts. Additionally, young people who were willing to test in youth-friendly clinics (AOR = 2.87; 95% CI: 1.09–7.51) had higher odds of testing for HIV compared to their counterparts. The utilisation of VHCT services among young people in Tema was found to be very low. Additionally, young people’s knowledge of VHCT services was below expectations.
Message-passing concurrency is a popular computation model that underlies several programming languages like, e.g., Erlang, Akka, and (to some extent) Go and Rust. In particular, we consider a message-passing concurrent language with dynamic process spawning and selective receives, i.e., where messages can only be consumed by the target process when they match a specific constraint (e.g., the case of Erlang). In this work, we introduce a notion of trace that can be seen as an abstraction of a class of causally equivalent executions (i.e., which produce the same outcome). We then show that execution traces can be used to identify message races. We provide constructive definitions to compute message races as well as to produce so-called race variants, which can then be used to drive new executions which are not causally equivalent to the previous ones. This is an essential ingredient of state-space exploration techniques for program verification.
En el texto se exponen algunas reflexiones sobre la importancia que tiene el rescatar los conocimientos tradicionales de las comunidades rurales, indígenas y campesinas sobre las prácticas agrícolas y alimenticias como recurso y mecanismo para favorecer la seguridad alimnetaria y de esta manera la sustentabilidad comunitaria. Se parte de una revisión bibliográfica sobre el tema, y se exponen casos específicos, como ejemplo, donde la experiencia se ha convertido en una oportunidad de algunas comunidades para hacer valer sus derechos de manejo de la tierra, los procesos que se requieren para la diversidad de cultivos, de su propio sistema de producción y de esta forma mitigar los efectos de la pobreza y consolidad una propuesta alterna para el ejercicio de la soberanía y seguridad alimentaria de las comunidades.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Human settlements. Communities
In recent times, with the main purpose of enhancing public health, proper management of household solid waste in low-income residential areas of urban centres has gained special attention among scholars in developing countries. From the sociological perspective, perception is one of the key determinants of the people’s behaviour in their society. Therefore this study examined the perception of people about solid waste management and identified the key factors influencing this perception. The study was carried out in the first quarters of 2021 and covered Ife Central Local Government Area of Osun State, South-West Nigeria and adopted cross-sectional research design. Purposive sampling method was used to select 5 electoral wards in the Local Government Area where heaps of dirt was more common and 30 households nearer to the heap in each of the wards respectively. The total sample size of 150 used in the study mainly composed the eldest and active female of each the selected household. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze the primary data gathered. This study found that the residents were aware of the health-related challenges resulted from improper management of solid waste and were interested in reducing household solid waste generated. However, methods, the cost, lack of cooperation and nonchalant attitude of people were among the major potential factors militating against achieving this.
Fix a prime $p >2$ and a finite field $\mathbb{F}_{q}$ with $q$ elements, where $q$ is a power of $p$. Let $m$ be a monic polynomial in the polynomial ring $\mathbb{F}_{q}[T]$ such that $deg(m)$ is large. Fix an integer $r\geq 2$, and let $a_1,\dots,a_r$ be distinct residue classes modulo $m$ that are relatively prime to $m$. In this paper, we derive an asymptotic formula for the natural density $δ_{m;a_1,\dots,a_r}$ of the set of all positive integers $X$ such that $\sum\limits_{N=1}^{X} π_{q}(a_1,m,N) > \sum\limits_{N=1}^{X} π_{q}(a_2,m,N) > \dots > \sum\limits_{N=1}^{X} π_{q}(a_r,m,N)$, where $π_{q}(a_i,m,N)$ denotes the number of irreducible monic polynomials in $\mathbb{F}_{q}[T]$ of degree $N$ that are congruent to $ a_i \bmod m$, under the assumption of LI (Linear Independence Hypothesis). Many consequences follow from our results. First, we deduce the exact rate at which $δ_{m;a_1,a_2}$ converges to $\frac{1}{2}$ as $deg(m)$ grows, where $a_1$ is a quadratic non-residue and $a_2$ is a quadratic residue modulo $m$, generalizing the work of Fiorilli and Martin. Furthermore, similarly to the number field setting, we show that two-way races behave differently than races involving three or more competitors, once $deg(m)$ is large. In particular, biases do appear in races involving three or more quadratic residues (or quadratic non-residues) modulo $m$. This work is a function field analog of the work of Lamzouri, who established similar results in the number field case. However, we exhibit some examples of races in function fields where LI is false, and where the associated densities vanish, or behave differently than in the number field setting.
Kiko Fernandez-Reyes, Isaac Oscar Gariano, James Noble
et al.
Dynamic languages like Erlang, Clojure, JavaScript, and E adopted data-race freedom by design. To enforce data-race freedom, these languages either deep copy objects during actor (thread) communication or proxy back to their owning thread. We present Dala, a simple programming model that ensures data-race freedom while supporting efficient inter-thread communication. Dala is a dynamic, concurrent, capability-based language that relies on three core capabilities: immutable values can be shared freely; isolated mutable objects can be transferred between threads but not aliased; local objects can be aliased within their owning thread but not dereferenced by other threads. Objects with capabilities can co-exist with unsafe objects, that are unchecked and may suffer data races, without compromising the safety of safe objects. We present a formal model of Dala, prove data race-freedom and state and prove a dynamic gradual guarantee. These theorems guarantee data race-freedom when using safe capabilities and show that the addition of capabilities is semantics preserving modulo permission and cast errors.