Temperament in Childhood Predicts Body Mass in Adulthood: The Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study.

This study examined associations of temperament at ages 6 to 12 with body-mass index (BMI) and waist circumference (WC) at ages 24 to 30 years. The participants were 619 men and women derived from the population-based Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study. Temperament was operationalized as (negative) emotionality, sociability, and activity. High emotionality predicted increased BMI, independently of WC, and independently of childhood and adulthood risk factors for adult obesity. None of the temperament dimensions had any associations with WC after controlling for BMI. The findings suggest that temperamental difficulty in childhood may be a useful risk indicator for general body mass in adulthood, and the mechanisms relating temperament with body mass should be further explored. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Wood inspection with non-supervised clustering

Abstract. The appearance of sawn timber has huge natural variations that the human inspector easily compensates for mentally when determining the types of defects and the grade of each board. However, for automatic wood inspection systems these variations are a major source for complication. This makes it difficult to use textbook methodologies for visual inspection. These methodologies generally aim at systems that are trained in a supervised manner with samples of defects and good material, but selecting and labeling the samples is an error-prone process that limits the accuracy that can be achieved. We present a non-supervised clustering-based approach for detecting and recognizing defects in lumber boards. A key idea is to employ a self-organizing map (SOM) for discriminating between sound wood and defects. Human involvement needed for training is minimal. The approach has been tested with color images of lumber boards, and the achieved false detection and error escape rates are low. The approach also provides a self-intuitive visual user interface. Received: 16 December 2000 / Accepted: 8 December 2001 Correspondence to: O. Silvén     

The biological leaching of an auriferous pyrite ore

The oxidation of an auriferous pyrite ore sample was evaluated in biological leaching experiments for subsequent gold recovery via cyanidation. In batch cultures, organisms derived from the mine site oxidized pyrite and ferrous iron at pH values as low as pH 0.6. The recovery of gold was variable in shake flask experiments. In stirred tank bioreactor leaching, gold recovery was proportional to the extent of iron dissolution by bioleaching. The leaching of arsenic from the sample was also directly proportional to iron dissolution.     

Computer program for automated sleep depth estimation

In this article, we present a new implementation of an amplitude-independent method for continuous-scale sleep depth estimation. Having been implemented as an add-on analysis module under commercially available biosignal recording and analysis software, it can be easily applied in clinical routine. The software gives the user full freedom to change all the analysis parameters inside theoretical limits. Computational sleep depth profiles produced by the presented software compare favourably with visual classifications. Future work will concentrate on systematic optimization of analysis parameters, further evaluation of the method with disturbed sleep and application of the method for automated adaptive sleep analysis.     

Perceptual Issues in Music Pattern Recognition: Complexity of Rhythm and Key Finding

We consider several perceptual issues in the context of machine recognition ofmusic patterns. It is argued that a successful implementation of a musicrecognition system must incorporate perceptual information and error criteria.We discuss several measures of rhythm complexity which are used fordetermining relative weights of pitch and rhythm errors. Then, a new methodfor determining a localized tonal context is proposed. This method is based onempirically derived key distances. The generated key assignments are then usedto construct the perceptual pitch error criterion which is based on noterelatedness ratings obtained from experiments with human listeners.     

The Nile Basin in a Global Perspective

Abstract

The Nile brings virtually no water to the sea. The mighty basin with 1/10 of Africa's land area and 1/3 of its population, has only 1/16 of its water. The riparian countries use practically all of the Nile's water and they face increasing challenges in terms of environmental degradation, food security, and socioeconomic development. The geopolitical situation blocks the integrated development of water resources in the basin scale, yet the political environment may be improving. The Nile basin is among the most critical regions of the world in terms of water resources development. In this article, the trends of the major driving forces within the basin countries—population, urbanization, climate, agriculture, economy, human resources, and governance—are scrutinized from the viewpoint of their impacts on water resources and their management. A comparison is made to four other critical macroregions: China, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and West Africa.     

化学分离法分析大型纸浆发电厂废渣中生物质底灰和飞灰成分(英文)

采用三步分离法,其中第一步用水,第二步用乙酸铵,第三步用盐酸,提取纸浆发电厂生物质飞灰和底灰的组分,以评估这些残渣的浸出行为。除了Mo、S、Na以及那些浓度低于检测范围的元素外,在这两种灰份中,对于其他元素这三种浸出剂的浸出能力从弱到强的顺序为:水、乙酸铵和盐酸。采用三步分离法处理的废渣中元素浓度比前期用BCR连续提取法得到的低。     

Performance tuning and sparse traversal technique for a cell‐based fetch length algorithm on a GPU

For determining distances (fetch lengths) from points to polygons in a two‐dimensional Euclidean plane, cell‐based algorithms provide a simple and effective solution. They divide the input area into a grid of cells that cover the area. The objects are stored into the appropriate cells, and the resulting structure is used for solving the problem. When the input objects are distributed unevenly or the cell size is small, most of the cells may be empty. The representation is then called sparse. In the method proposed in this work, each cell contains information about its distance to the nonempty cells. It is then possible to skip over several empty cells at a time without memory accesses. A cell‐based fetch length algorithm is implemented on a graphics processing unit (GPU). Because control flow divergence reduces its performance, several methods to reduce the divergence are studied. While many of the explicit attempts turn out to be unsuccessful, sorting of the input data and sparse traversal are observed to greatly improve performance: compared with the initial GPU implementation, up to 45‐fold speedup is reached. The speed improvement is greatest when the map is very sparse and the points are given in a random order. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.