The objective of this study was to investigate secular trends in adolescent health status and healthcare consultations.
The design of this study is cross-sectional comparisons of population survey ...outcomes.
Canadian national population data from 2007 to 2016 (T1 N = 14,223; T2 N = 14,247; T3 N = 13,532; T4 N = 13,184; T5 N = 11,122; Total N = 66,308) were examined to find trends in health diagnosis (chronic illnesses and mental disorders) and healthcare consultation (general health practitioners and mental health professionals). Controlling demographics, Multivariate analysis of covariances (MANCOVAs) and correlations were carried out to compare differences by age group (A1: 12–14 years N = 25,180; A2: 15–17 years N = 25,825; A3: 18–19 years N = 15,303) and gender (girls N = 32,388; boys N = 33,920) across survey years.
Steady increases were found in diagnosed mental disorders and consultations with a mental health professional (MP) for girls, while chronic illnesses remained stable and general practitioner consultations declined for all adolescents over these years. Gender disparity in MP consultations grew with age, much more in recent years, whereas chronic illness diagnoses curved down for all in midadolescence. More integrated relations between health status and healthcare utilization were noted in T5 than in T1.
Differential secular trends were shown for adolescent physical versus mental health statuses and relevant healthcare consultations. Although girls' and older adolescents’ mental health declined over the years, a positive direction was also found for improved awareness of mental health.
•Adolescent health diagnosis and consultation are investigated from 2007 to 2016.•Stabilizing chronic illnesses while increasing mental disorders has been the trend.•Expanding gender disparities are found in mental diagnosis over time.•Greater age differences are detected for mental disorder diagnosis more recently.•Lately, girls have consulted mental health professions much more than boys.
Modified local meteorology owing to heterogeneities in the urban–rural surface can affect urban air quality. In this study, the impacts of urban land-surface forcing on ozone air quality during a ...high ozone (O3) episode in the Seoul metropolitan area, South Korea, are investigated using a high-resolution chemical transport model (CMAQ). Under fair weather conditions, the temperature excess (urban heat island) significantly modifies boundary layer characteristics/structures and local circulations. The modified boundary layer and local circulations result in an increase in O3 levels in the urban area of 16 ppb in the nighttime and 13 ppb in the daytime. Enhanced turbulence in the deep urban boundary layer dilutes pollutants such as NOx, and this contributes to the elevated O3 levels through the reduced O3 destruction by NO in the NOx-rich environment. The advection of O3 precursors over the mountains near Seoul by the prevailing valley-breeze circulation in the mid- to late morning results in the build-up of O3 over the mountains in conjunction with biogenic volatile organic compound (BVOC) emissions there. As the prevailing local circulation in the afternoon changes to urban-breeze circulation, the O3-rich air masses over the mountains are advected over the urban area. The urban-breeze circulation exerts significant influences on not only the advection of O3 but also the chemical production of O3 under the circumstances in which both anthropogenic and biogenic (natural) emissions play important roles in O3 formation. As the air masses that are characterized by low NOx and high BVOC levels and long OH chain length are advected over the urban area from the surroundings, the ozone production efficiency increases in the urban area. The relatively strong vertical mixing in the urban boundary layer embedded in the sea-breeze inflow layer reduces NOx levels, thus contributing to the elevated O3 levels in the urban area.
•Traffic congestion is rapidly increasing in urban areas.•Existing techniques are not enough for monitoring an entire transportation system.•Real-time data and intelligent ways are needed to ...determine traffic activities.•Rating scores of city are not efficient enough to deliver precise information.•Proposed: Fuzzy ontology-based sentiment analysis and rule-based decision-making.
Traffic congestion is rapidly increasing in urban areas, particularly in mega cities. To date, there exist a few sensor network based systems to address this problem. However, these techniques are not suitable enough in terms of monitoring an entire transportation system and delivering emergency services when needed. These techniques require real-time data and intelligent ways to quickly determine traffic activity from useful information. In addition, these existing systems and websites on city transportation and travel rely on rating scores for different factors (e.g., safety, low crime rate, cleanliness, etc.). These rating scores are not efficient enough to deliver precise information, whereas reviews or tweets are significant, because they help travelers and transportation administrators to know about each aspect of the city. However, it is difficult for travelers to read, and for transportation systems to process, all reviews and tweets to obtain expressive sentiments regarding the needs of the city. The optimum solution for this kind of problem is analyzing the information available on social network platforms and performing sentiment analysis. On the other hand, crisp ontology-based frameworks cannot extract blurred information from tweets and reviews; therefore, they produce inadequate results. In this regard, this paper proposes fuzzy ontology-based sentiment analysis and semantic web rule language (SWRL) rule-based decision-making to monitor transportation activities (accidents, vehicles, street conditions, traffic volume, etc.) and to make a city-feature polarity map for travelers. This system retrieves reviews and tweets related to city features and transportation activities. The feature opinions are extracted from these retrieved data, and then fuzzy ontology is used to determine the transportation and city-feature polarity. A fuzzy ontology and an intelligent system prototype are developed by using Protégé web ontology language (OWL) and Java, respectively. The experimental results show satisfactory improvement in tweet and review analysis and opinion mining.
Abstract
KAGRA is a newly built gravitational-wave telescope, a laser interferometer comprising arms with a length of 3 km, located in Kamioka, Gifu, Japan. KAGRA was constructed under the ground and ...it is operated using cryogenic mirrors that help in reducing the seismic and thermal noise. Both technologies are expected to provide directions for the future of gravitational-wave telescopes. In 2019, KAGRA finished all installations with the designed configuration, which we call the baseline KAGRA. For this occasion, we present an overview of the baseline KAGRA from various viewpoints in a series of articles. In this article, we introduce the design configurations of KAGRA with its historical background.
Absorption spectra of very small metal clusters exhibit individual peaks that reflect the discreteness of their localized electronic states. With increasing size, these states develop into bands and ...the discrete absorption peaks give way to smooth spectra with, at most, a broad localized surface-plasmon resonance band. The widely accepted view over the last decades has been that clusters of more than a few dozen atoms are large enough to have necessarily smooth spectra. Here we show through theory and experiment that for the ubiquitous thiolate cluster compound Au144(SR)60 this view has to be revised: clearly visible individual peaks pervade the full near-IR, VIS and near-UV ranges of low-temperature spectra, conveying information on quantum states in the cluster. The peaks develop well reproducibly with decreasing temperature, thereby highlighting the importance of temperature effects. Calculations using time-dependent density-functional theory indicate the contributions of different parts of the cluster-ligand compound to the spectra.
This paper proposes a novel technique that can augment heat transfer but nevertheless can reduce pressure-loss in a fin-tube heat exchanger with circular tubes in a relatively low Reynolds number ...flow, by deploying delta winglet-type vortex generators. The winglets are placed with a heretofore-unused orientation for the purpose of augmentation of heat transfer. This orientation is called as “common flow up” configuration. The proposed configuration causes significant separation delay, reduces form drag, and removes the zone of poor heat transfer from the near-wake of the tubes. This enhancement strategy has been successfully verified by experiments in the proposed configuration. In case of staggered tube banks, the heat transfer was augmented by 30% to 10%, and yet the pressure loss was reduced by 55% to 34% for the Reynolds number (based on two times channel height) ranging from 350 to 2100, when the present winglets were added. In case of in-line tube banks, these were found to be 20% to 10% augmentation, and 15% to 8% reduction, respectively.
In this study, an Active Mass Damper (AMD) consisting of an AC servo motor, a movable mass connected to the AC servo motor by a ball-screw mechanism, and an accelerometer as a sensor for vibration ...measurement were considered. Considering the capability of the AC servo motor which can follow the desired displacement accurately, the Negative Acceleration Feedback (NAF) control algorithm which uses the acceleration signal directly and produces the desired displacement for the active mass was proposed. The effectiveness of the NAF control was proved theoretically using a single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) system. It was found that the stability condition for the NAF control is static and it can effectively increase the damping of the target natural mode without causing instability in the low frequency region. Based on the theoretical results of the SDOF system, the Multi-Modal NAF (MMNAF) control is proposed to suppress the many natural modes of multi-degree-of-freedom (MDOF) systems using a single AMD. It was proved both theoretically and experimentally that the MMNAF control can suppress vibrations of the MDOF system.
This study is concerned with the theoretical modelling and experimental verification of the coupled vibrations of building and elevator ropes. The elevator ropes consist of a main rope which supports ...the cage and the compensation rope which is connected to the compensation sheave. The elevator rope is a flexible wire with a low damping, so it is prone to vibrations. In the case of a high-rise building, the rope length also increases significantly, so that the fundamental frequency of the elevator rope approaches the fundamental frequency of the building thus increasing the possibility of resonance. In this study, the dynamic model for the analysis of coupled vibrations of building and elevator ropes was derived by using Hamilton's principle, where the cage motion was also considered. An experimental testbed was built to validate the proposed dynamic model. It was found that the experimental results are in good agreement with the theoretical predictions thus validating the proposed dynamic model. The proposed model was then used to predict the vibrations of real building and elevator ropes.
Abstract
KAGRA is a newly built gravitational wave observatory, a laser interferometer with a 3 km arm length, located at Kamioka, Gifu, Japan. In this series of articles we present an overview of ...the baseline KAGRA, for which we finished installing the designed configuration in 2019. This article describes the method of calibration (CAL) used for reconstructing gravitational wave signals from the detector outputs, as well as the characterization of the detector (DET). We also review the physical environmental monitoring (PEM) system and the geophysics interferometer (GIF). Both are used for characterizing and evaluating the data quality of the gravitational wave channel. They play important roles in utilizing the detector output for gravitational wave searches. These characterization investigations will be even more important in the near future, once gravitational wave detection has been achieved, and in using KAGRA in the gravitational wave astronomy era.
Ultrafast two dimensional infrared (2D-IR) vibrational echo spectroscopy has emerged as a powerful method for the study of molecular dynamics under thermal equilibrium conditions occurring on ...ultrafast time scales. Here, we describe experimental details of 2D-IR vibrational echo spectroscopy including the experimental setup, pulse sequence, heterodyne detection, and extraction of the mainly absorptive part of the 2D-IR spectrum. As an experimental example, the measurements of the hydrogen bond dynamics of neat water and water in a high concentration of NaBr solution are presented and compared. The experiments are performed on OD stretching vibration of dilute HOD in H
2
O to eliminate contributions from vibrational excitation transport. A new experimental observable for extracting dynamical information that yields the frequency-frequency correlation function is presented. The observable is the inverse of the center line slope (CLS) of the 2D spectrum, which varies from a maximum of 1 to 0 as spectral diffusion proceeds. The CLS is the inverse of the slope of the line that connects the maxima of the peaks of a series of cuts through the 2D spectrum that are parallel to the frequency axis associated with the first radiation field-matter interaction. Comparisons of the dynamics obtained from the data on water and the concentrated NaBr solutions show that the hydrogen bond dynamics of water around ions are much slower than in bulk water.
PDF
