Topic: Visual impairment (VI) and cognitive impairment (CIM) are prevalent age-related conditions that impose substantial burden on the society. Findings on the hypothesized bidirectional association of VI and CIM remains equivocal. Hence, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to examine this bidirectional relationship. Clinical relevance: Sixty percent risk of CIM has not been well elucidated in the literature. A bidirectional relationship between VI and CIM may support the development of strategies for early detection and management of risk factors for both conditions in older people. Methods: PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane Central registers were searched systematically for observational studies, published from inception until April 6, 2020, in adults 40 years of age or older reporting objectively measured VI and CIM assessment using clinically validated cognitive screening tests or diagnostic evaluation. Meta-analyses on cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between VI and CIM outcomes (any CIM assessed using screening tests and clinically diagnosed dementia) were examined. Random effect models were used to generate pooled odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). We also examined study quality, publication bias, and heterogeneity. Results: Forty studies were included (n = 47 913 570). Meta-analyses confirmed that persons with VI were more likely to have CIM, with significantly higher odds of: (1) any CIM (cross-sectional: OR, 2.38 [95% CI, 1.84-3.07]; longitudinal: OR, 1.66 [95% CI, 1.46-1.89]) and (2) clinically diagnosed dementia (cross-sectional: OR, 2.43 [95% CI, 1.48-4.01]; longitudinal: OR, 2.09 [95% CI, 1.37-3.21]) compared with persons without VI. Significant heterogeneity was explained partially by differences in age, sex, and follow-up duration. Also, some evidence suggested that individuals with CIM, relative to cognitively intact persons, were more likely to have VI, with most articles (8/9 [89%]) reporting significantly positive associations; however, meta-analyses on this association could not be conducted because of insufficient data. Discussion: Overall, our work suggests that VI is a risk factor of CIM, although further work is needed to confirm the association of CIM as a risk factor for VI. Strategies for early detection and management of both conditions in older people may minimize individual clinical and public health consequences.
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The recent success of Machine Learning encouraged research using artificial neural networks (NNs) in computer graphics. A good example is the bidirectional texture function (BTF), a data-driven representation of surface materials that can encapsulate complex behaviors that would otherwise be too expensive to calculate for real-time applications, such as self-shadowing and interreflections. We propose two changes to the state-of-the-art using neural networks for BTFs, specifically NeuMIP. These changes, suggested by recent work in neural scene representation and rendering, aim to improve baseline quality, memory footprint, and performance. We conduct an ablation study to evaluate the impact of each change. We test both synthetic and real data, and provide a working implementation within the Mitsuba 2 rendering framework. Our results show that our method outperforms the baseline in all these metrics and that neural BTF is part of the broader field of neural scene representation. Project website: https://traverse-research.github.io/NeuBTF/.
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This work reports the fabrication of a titanium carbide nanoparticle-based inkjet printed flexible bidirectional flow sensor. The design of the flow sensor consists of an inkjet printed titanium carbide piezoresistive strain gauge on a polyester cantilever. The sensors demonstrated a normalized flow sensitivity of 1.043/(ms-1) in the velocity range 0.15 - 0.55 m/s (for water flow). The fabrication method reported in this work potentially opens a new direction for fabrication of a class of robust, repeatable, and inexpensive flexible flow sensors.
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A lab-based test setup was developed to simulate a novel droop rate controlled DC bus charging plaza installation in the Netherlands. The system consists of multiple bidirectional DC charging points, a PV array and a bidirectional grid connection. Currently the installed system employs linear droop control at the charge points and active grid connection. This lab setup allows for the testing of new control schemes, such as piecewise linear droop control, before implementing in the installed system. The simulations performed in this study investigate a variety of power flow scenarios and determine appropriate voltage and current setpoints and control mechanisms.
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Public lighting’s primary purpose is nighttime visibility for security and safety. How to meet so many requirements of so many stakeholders? The key to developing a good plan is to relate lighting to functions of public spaces, because street lighting is more than a technical requirement, a security need, or a design element. It can be thought of and utilized in terms of how the type, placement, and wattage affect how a street is perceived and used. With present-day used street lighting systems however, flexibility is expensive, as is maintenance and energy consumption. A new solution is to use LED lighting with a Direct Current power system. Advantages are a decrease in: energy conversions; material use; amount of switch- boxes; components; labour costs and environmental comfort. The overall implementation of LED and DC will result in better control and efficient maintenance due to integrated bidirectional communication. A challenge is the relatively high investment for these new solutions. Another challenge; DC is not a standard yet in rules and regulations. In the paper the transition to direct current public lighting system will be described with all the pros and cons. A new concept of public ownership, to overcome financial challenges will be discussed. M Hulsebosch1, P Willigenburg2 ,J Woudstra2 and B Groenewald3 1CityTec b.v., Alblasserdam, The Netherlands 2The Hague University of Applied Sciences, The Hague, The Netherlands 3Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town, South Africa 10.1109/ICUE.2014.6904186
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A considerable amount of literature has been published on Corporate Reputation, Branding and Brand Image. These studies are extensive and focus particularly on questionnaires and statistical analysis. Although extensive research has been carried out, no single study was found which attempted to predict corporate reputation performance based on data collected from media sources. To perform this task, a biLSTM Neural Network extended with attention mechanism was utilized. The advantages of this architecture are that it obtains excellent performance for NLP tasks. The state-of-the-art designed model achieves highly competitive results, F1 scores around 72%, accuracy of 92% and loss around 20%.
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Combining electric cars with utility services seems to be a natural fit and holds the promise to tackle various mobility as well as electricity challenges at the same time. So far no viable business model for vehicle-to-grid technology has emerged, raising the question which characteristics a vehicle-to-grid business model should have. Drawing on an exploratory study amongst 189 Dutch consumers this study seeks to understand consumer preferences in vehicle-to-grid business models using conjoint analysis, factor analysis and cluster analysis. The results suggest that consumers prefer private ownership of an EV and a bidirectional charger instead of community ownership of bidirectional charger, they prefer utility companies instead of car companies as the aggregator and they require home and public charging. The most salient attributes in a V2G business model seem to be functional rather than financial or social. The customer segment with the highest willingness to adopt V2G prefers functional attributes. Based on the findings, the study proposes a business model that incorporates the derived preferences
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, the bidirectional relationship between policy and data reliability has been a challenge for researchers of the local municipal health services. Policy decisions on population specific test locations and selective registration of negative test results led to population differences in data quality. This hampered the calculation of reliable population specific infection rates needed to develop proper data driven public health policy. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12508-023-00377-y
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Standard mass-production is a well-known manufacturing concept. To make small quantities or even single items of a product according to user specifications at an affordable price, alternative agile production paradigms should be investigated and developed. The system presented in this paper is based on a grid of cheap reconfigurable production units, called equiplets. A grid of these equiplets is capable to produce a variety of different products in parallel at an affordable price. The underlying agent-based software for this system is responsible for the agile manufacturing. An important aspect of this type of manufacturing is the transport of the products along the available equiplets. This transport of the products from equiplet to equiplet is quite different from standard production. Every product can have its own unique path along the equiplets. In this paper several topologies are discussed and investigated. Also, the planning and scheduling in relation to the transport constraints is subject of this study. Some possibilities of realization are discussed and simulations are used to generate results with the focus on efficiency and usability for different topologies and layouts of the grid and its internal transport system.
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Standard mass-production is a well-known manufacturing concept. To make small quantities or even single items of a product according to user specifications at an affordable price, alternative agile production paradigms should be investigated and developed. The system presented in this article is based on a grid of cheap reconfigurable production units, called equiplets. A grid of these equiplets is capable to produce a variety of different products in parallel at an affordable price. The underlying agent-based software for this system is responsible for the agile manufacturing. An important aspect of this type of manufacturing is the transport of the products along the available equiplets. This transport of the products from equiplet to equiplet is quite different from standard production. Every product can have its own unique path along the equiplets. In this article several topologies are discussed and investigated. Also, the planning and scheduling in relation to the transport constraints is subject of this study. Some possibilities of realization are discussed and simulations are used to generate results with the focus on efficiency and usability for different topologies and layouts of the grid and its internal transport system. Closely related with this problem is the scheduling of the production in the grid. A discussion about the maximum achievable load on the production grid and its relation with the transport system is also included.
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