The idea, the machine, and the art: word and image in the 21st century

Taking in recent advances in neuroscience and digital technology, Gander and Garland assess the state of the inter-arts in America and the Western world, exploring and questioning the primacy of affect in an increasingly hypertextual everyday environment. In this analysis they signal a move beyond W. J. T. Mitchell’s coinage of the ‘imagetext’ to an approach that centres the reader-viewer in a recognition, after John Dewey, of ‘art as experience’. New thinking in cognitive and computer sciences about the relationship between the body and the mind challenges any established definitions of ‘embodiment’, ‘materiality’, ‘virtuality’ and even ‘intelligence, they argue, whilst ‘Extended Mind Theory’, they note, marries our cognitive processes with the material forms with which we engage, confirming and complicating Marshall McLuhan’s insight, decades ago, that ‘all media are “extensions of man”’. In this chapter, Gander and Garland open paths and suggest directions into understandings and critical interpretations of new and emerging imagetext worlds and experiences.

Overweight and obesity on the island of Ireland: an estimation of costs

Objectives The increasing prevalence of overweight and obesity worldwide continues to compromise population health and creates a wider societal cost in terms of productivity loss and premature mortality. Despite extensive international literature on the cost of overweight and obesity, findings are inconsistent between Europe and the USA, and particularly within Europe. Studies vary on issues of focus, specific costs and methods. This study aims to estimate the healthcare and productivity costs of overweight and obesity for the island of Ireland in 2009, using both top-down and bottom-up approaches.

Methods Costs were estimated across four categories: healthcare utilisation, drug costs, work absenteeism and premature mortality. Healthcare costs were estimated using Population Attributable Fractions (PAFs). PAFs were applied to national cost data for hospital care and drug prescribing. PAFs were also applied to social welfare and national mortality data to estimate productivity costs due to absenteeism and premature mortality.

Results The healthcare costs of overweight and obesity in 2009 were estimated at €437 million for the Republic of Ireland (ROI) and €127.41 million for NI. Productivity loss due to overweight and obesity was up to €865 million for ROI and €362 million for NI. The main drivers of healthcare costs are cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes, colon cancer, stroke and gallbladder disease. In terms of absenteeism, low back pain is the main driver in both jurisdictions, and for productivity loss due to premature mortality the primary driver of cost is coronary heart disease.

Conclusions The costs are substantial, and urgent public health action is required in Ireland to address the problem of increasing prevalence of overweight and obesity, which if left unchecked will lead to unsustainable cost escalation within the health service and unacceptable societal costs.

Identification of Peptide Inhibitors of Enveloped Viruses Using Support Vector Machine

The peptides derived from envelope proteins have been shown to inhibit the protein-protein interactions in the virus membrane fusion process and thus have a great potential to be developed into effective antiviral therapies. There are three types of envelope proteins each exhibiting distinct structure folds. Although the exact fusion mechanism remains elusive, it was suggested that the three classes of viral fusion proteins share a similar mechanism of membrane fusion. The common mechanism of action makes it possible to correlate the properties of self-derived peptide inhibitors with their activities. Here we developed a support vector machine model using sequence-based statistical scores of self-derived peptide inhibitors as input features to correlate with their activities. The model displayed 92% prediction accuracy with the Matthew’s correlation coefficient of 0.84, obviously superior to those using physicochemical properties and amino acid decomposition as input. The predictive support vector machine model for self- derived peptides of envelope proteins would be useful in development of antiviral peptide inhibitors targeting the virus fusion process.

Elastodynamic Modeling and Analysis for an Exechon Parallel Kinematic Machine

As a newly invented parallel kinematic machine (PKM), Exechon has attracted intensive attention from both academic and industrial fields due to its conceptual high performance. Nevertheless, the dynamic behaviors of Exechon PKM have not been thoroughly investigated because of its structural and kinematic complexities. To identify the dynamic characteristics of Exechon PKM, an elastodynamic model is proposed with the substructure synthesis technique in this paper. The Exechon PKM is divided into a moving platform subsystem, a fixed base subsystem and three limb subsystems according to its structural features. Differential equations of motion for the limb subsystem are derived through finite element (FE) formulations by modeling the complex limb structure as a spatial beam with corresponding geometric cross sections. Meanwhile, revolute, universal, and spherical joints are simplified into virtual lumped springs associated with equivalent stiffnesses and mass at their geometric centers. Differential equations of motion for the moving platform are derived with Newton's second law after treating the platform as a rigid body due to its comparatively high rigidity. After introducing the deformation compatibility conditions between the platform and the limbs, governing differential equations of motion for Exechon PKM are derived. The solution to characteristic equations leads to natural frequencies and corresponding modal shapes of the PKM at any typical configuration. In order to predict the dynamic behaviors in a quick manner, an algorithm is proposed to numerically compute the distributions of natural frequencies throughout the workspace. Simulation results reveal that the lower natural frequencies are strongly position-dependent and distributed axial-symmetrically due to the structure symmetry of the limbs. At the last stage, a parametric analysis is carried out to identify the effects of structural, dimensional, and stiffness parameters on the system's dynamic characteristics with the purpose of providing useful information for optimal design and performance improvement of the Exechon PKM. The elastodynamic modeling methodology and dynamic analysis procedure can be well extended to other overconstrained PKMs with minor modifications.

Modelling the fresh properties of self-compacting concrete using support vector machine approach

The main objective of the study presented in this paper was to investigate the feasibility using support vector machines (SVM) for the prediction of the fresh properties of self-compacting concrete. The radial basis function (RBF) and polynomial kernels were used to predict these properties as a function of the content of mix components. The fresh properties were assessed with the slump flow, T50, T60, V-funnel time, Orimet time, and blocking ratio (L-box). The retention of these tests was also measured at 30 and 60 min after adding the first water. The water dosage varied from 188 to 208 L/m3, the dosage of superplasticiser (SP) from 3.8 to 5.8 kg/m3, and the volume of coarse aggregates from 220 to 360 L/m3. In total, twenty mixes were used to measure the fresh state properties with different mixture compositions. RBF kernel was more accurate compared to polynomial kernel based support vector machines with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 26.9 (correlation coefficient of R2 = 0.974) for slump flow prediction, a RMSE of 0.55 (R2 = 0.910) for T50 (s) prediction, a RMSE of 1.71 (R2 = 0.812) for T60 (s) prediction, a RMSE of 0.1517 (R2 = 0.990) for V-funnel time prediction, a RMSE of 3.99 (R2 = 0.976) for Orimet time prediction, and a RMSE of 0.042 (R2 = 0.988) for L-box ratio prediction, respectively. A sensitivity analysis was performed to evaluate the effects of the dosage of cement and limestone powder, the water content, the volumes of coarse aggregate and sand, the dosage of SP and the testing time on the predicted test responses. The analysis indicates that the proposed SVM RBF model can gain a high precision, which provides an alternative method for predicting the fresh properties of SCC.

A new Nawaz–Enscore–Ham-based heuristic for permutation flow-shop problem with bicriteria of makespan and machine idle-time

A new heuristic based on Nawaz–Enscore–Ham (NEH) algorithm is proposed for solving permutation flowshop scheduling problem in this paper. A new priority rule is proposed by accounting for the average, mean absolute deviation, skewness and kurtosis, in order to fully describe the distribution style of processing times. A new tie-breaking rule is also introduced for achieving effective job insertion for the objective of minimizing both makespan and machine idle-time. Statistical tests illustrate better solution quality of the proposed algorithm, comparing to existing benchmark heuristics.