Household Objects Research Articles

A Goal Programming Approach to Multi-Objective Farm Planning Among Small-Scale Arable Crop Farmers in Kogi State, Nigeria

Summary The purpose of this study was to develop prototype farm plans according to the multi-objective production goals of small-scale arable crop producers in Kogi State, Nigeria. A multi-stage sampling technique was used to select a total of 137 farm households in different local government areas (LGAs). A structured questionnaire complemented with interview schedule was used to collect primary data from the respondents. Descriptive statistics and linear goal programming were used for data analysis. The results obtained indicate that the optimal plan of generating an income of ₦242,076.20 requires 0.368 ha of melons, 0.044 ha of yam/maize mixture and 0.259 ha of sorghum/groundnuts. The optimal net profit was 44.05% higher than that achieved by implementing the existing plan. To meet family food requirements, the solution plan prescribed devoting 0.048 ha to cassava, 0.211 ha to sorghum, 0.368 ha to melons, 0.074ha to Bambara nuts, and 1.065 ha to sorghum/groundnuts to generate an income of ₦158,475.00. To minimize paid labour and generate an income of ₦168,325.50, the plan prescribed devoting 0.195 ha to rice, 0.502 ha to melons and 0.246 ha to Bambara nuts. Out of the three basic farm household objectives considered, meeting family food requirements and limiting labour expenditure were overachieved, whereas the objective of maximizing farm income was underachieved. A great deal of the existing staple food plan was found consistent with the prescribed optimal plan, except in the case of existing cassava and Bambara nut production which was falling short of the optimal production prescribed. The maize/groundnut production had the lowest shadow prices. However, land, labour, capital, agrochemicals, fertilizers and seeds constituted the limiting resources in the plan. It was found that these resources were not optimally allocated in the existing plan for arable crop activities. Therefore, the respondents were advised to utilize their resources as prescribed in the optimum plan, supported by farm advisory services in selecting good crop mixtures.

The Domestic Life of Buyi Videos: The ‘Home Mode’ in Ethnic Rural Southwest China

ABSTRACT Cheap amateur videodiscs are a common household object in Buyi (Bouyei) villages in Guizhou, southwest China. Buyi videographers are hired to record and edit footage of local life-cycle rituals and household banquets, and copied videodiscs are distributed informally to, and repeatedly viewed by, relatives, neighbours, and fellow villagers—mostly middle-aged women. Attentive to on-demand, vernacular video products as such that are underexplored in media anthropology, I examine the Buyi domestic videos as straddling the private and public realms of cultural production. While playing a significant role in the construction of ‘home’ as mediated spaces and bodily practices, these domestic videos thrive on an intimate public, which emerges out of an on-demand economy based on kinship-based and place-based networks. This video sociality involves a milieu of relationality for those that enter into its sphere, binding shared objects, aesthetics, emotions, and experiences together.

Mono- and Rare Trinuclear Zn(II) Complexes with Near-Infrared Emissive Ligands: Anion-Responsive Nuclearity Control, Interconversion, Solid-State NIR Emission, and Latent Fingerprint Imaging

The ability to predictably control the nuclearity of metal complexes is vital in developing functional coordination compounds and metal–organic frameworks. However, consistent nuclearity control achieving complexes of different nuclearities using a series of ligands is difficult, especially when the metal ion involved does not show any crystal field stabilization energy for a particular geometry. Herein, a series of three mononuclear (M1–M3) and the corresponding trinuclear (T1–T3) Zn(II) complexes have been synthesized from a series of near-infrared (NIR)-emitting ligands (HL1–HL3) through counterion control (ZnCl2 vs Zn(OAc)2). The structural analyses revealed a regular distorted tetrahedral geometry for the mononuclear complexes, M1–M3. However, the complexes T1–T3 showed a rare trinuclear structure, in which two deprotonated ligand molecules coordinate with three Zn(II) centers such that a central octahedral Zn ion is connected to two terminal tetrahedral Zn ions through phenolate and acetate bridging groups. Intramolecular π–π stacking interactions between the constituting ligands play significant roles in forming such a rare geometry. The plausible reasons for the counterion-controlled nuclearity have been proposed along with successful interconversion of trinuclear complexes to mononuclear complexes at 65 °C. The complexes M1–M3 and T1–T3 exhibited substituent and nuclearity-dependent photophysical properties. In the solid state, two of the mononuclear complexes, M1 and M2, displayed NIR emissions (661–670 nm), while the trinuclear complexes T1–T3 emitted yellow/orange fluorescence (572–607 nm). The complexes M2 and T1 were successfully tested as latent fingerprint (LFP) imaging agents on several non-infiltrating and semi-infiltrating substrates, including everyday household objects, using the powder dusting method. In all these cases, highly fluorescent LFP images with high sensitivity, selectivity, and contrast and low background interference have been obtained.

Object play in the everyday home environment generates rich opportunities for infant learning

Infants everywhere engage with objects throughout the day, even if the objects of play differ across cultures. Indeed, object play is a universal context for learning. Yet, the characteristics of object play at home remain largely unexamined, especially in infants from non-English-speaking backgrounds. Through frame-by-frame video coding, we documented Hispanic infants’ object interactions based on 1–2 h of naturalistic home observations. Infants interacted with a wide variety of toys and household objects in brief bouts that summed to ~60% of their time. As infants transition among objects, they serendipitously generate opportunities for learning that support development across domains.

Electrical Capacitance Tomography Sensor With House Structure for Assisting Recognition of Objects

As a fast and non-invasive visualization technology, electrical capacitance tomography(ECT) avoids the problem that camera imaging technology is interfered by light and can’t identify material properties. However, the traditional ECT sensor research mainly focused on the image reconstruction of multiphase flow between electrodes, without considering the object recognition performance through the dielectric distribution of the objects. Therefore, we propose a new ECT sensor (called House Sensor) with house-like structure, which is suitable for multi features detection of household objects. We analyze the sensitivity distribution of House Sensor, and use linear back projection (LBP) and Tikhonov regularization for high-speed image reconstruction. 20 objects with different sizes and dielectric constants are visually clustered by t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) to verify the feasibility of classification, and the accuracy of Random Forest (RF) is up to 95.3% within 3.5ms. This implies that House Sensor provide a new feasible scheme to assist object recognition under non-vision conditions.

A Study on Visual Understanding Image Captioning using Different Word Embeddings and CNN-Based Feature Extractions

Image captioning is a task that can provide a description of an image in natural language. Image captioning can be used for a variety of applications, such as image indexing and virtual assistants. In this research, we compared the performance of three different word embeddings, namely, GloVe, Word2Vec, FastText and six CNN-based feature extraction architectures such as, Inception V3, InceptionResNet V2, ResNet152 V2, EfficientNet B3 V1, EfficientNet B7 V1, and NASNetLarge which then will be combined with LSTM as the decoder to perform image captioning. We used ten different household objects (bed, cell phone, chair, couch, oven, potted plant, refrigerator, sink, table, and tv) that were obtained from MSCOCO dataset to develop the model. Then, we created five new captions in Bahasa Indonesia for the selected images. The captions might contain details about the name, the location, the color, the size, and the characteristics of an object and its surrounding area. In our 18 experimental models, we used different combination of the word embedding and CNN-based feature extraction architecture, along with LSTM to train the model. As the result, models that used the combination of Word2Vec + NASNetLarge performed better in generating Indonesian captions than the other models based on BLEU-4 metric.

Improving Robotic Hand Prosthesis Control With Eye Tracking and Computer Vision: A Multimodal Approach Based on the Visuomotor Behavior of Grasping

The complexity and dexterity of the human hand make the development of natural and robust control of hand prostheses challenging. Although a large number of control approaches were developed and investigated in the last decades, limited robustness in real-life conditions often prevented their application in clinical settings and in commercial products. In this paper, we investigate a multimodal approach that exploits the use of eye-hand coordination to improve the control of myoelectric hand prostheses. The analyzed data are from the publicly available MeganePro Dataset 1, that includes multimodal data from transradial amputees and able-bodied subjects while grasping numerous household objects with ten grasp types. A continuous grasp-type classification based on surface electromyography served as both intent detector and classifier. At the same time, the information provided by eye-hand coordination parameters, gaze data and object recognition in first-person videos allowed to identify the object a person aims to grasp. The results show that the inclusion of visual information significantly increases the average offline classification accuracy by up to 15.61 ± 4.22% for the transradial amputees and of up to 7.37 ± 3.52% for the able-bodied subjects, allowing trans-radial amputees to reach average classification accuracy comparable to intact subjects and suggesting that the robustness of hand prosthesis control based on grasp-type recognition can be significantly improved with the inclusion of visual information extracted by leveraging natural eye-hand coordination behavior and without placing additional cognitive burden on the user.

Object as subject: Material agency in Ismat Chughtai’s “The Quilt” and “Chhoti Apa”

ABSTRACT Ismat Chughtai was an Urdu-language writer in India whose affiliation with the Progressive Writers Movement sparked a lifelong tryst with socialism. This article examines the “material agency” found in household objects that help to co-create a society for women within their private gendered domains in which they hold power. The quilt and the diary – objects in Chughtai’s short stories “The Quilt” and “Chhoti Apa” respectively – serve as biographical insight into the women’s lives because they create a subjectivity that was previously denied to Muslim women by oriental ethnographic studies. The agency of the objects lies in their ability to morph their meaning according to contexts, revealing the socially constructed nature of identity of humans and objects, forged by wrestling with variables such as gender and sexuality. Chughtai’s stories “unveil” Muslim women’s daily performative acts of resistance in a decolonial discourse on material culture and postcolonial feminism.

The Castle of Truth and Other Revolutionary Tales by Hermynia Zur Mühlen

Reviewed by: The Castle of Truth and Other Revolutionary Tales by Hermynia Zur Mühlen Anna Kérchy (bio) The Castle of Truth and Other Revolutionary Tales. By Hermynia Zur Mühlen, edited and translated by Jack Zipes, Princeton University Press, 2020, 187 pp. The Castle of Truth and Other Revolutionary Tales was published in Princeton University Press's Oddly Modern Fairy Tales series dedicated to exploring unusual, uncanny, unjustly forgotten early twentieth-century literary fairy tales. These stories are historically significant as genuine innovators of the genre and still strike a chord with contemporary readers a century later as vanguardist practitioners of postmodern narratological strategies well ahead of their time. After intriguing collections of tales by an impressive range of international artists, including Kurt Schwitters, Béla Balázs, Édouard Labouyale, and Naomi Mitchison among others, editor-translator Jack Zipes introduces readers in the tenth volume of the series to a curious corpus of radical political fairy tales—some available in English for the first time—authored by an extraordinary woman writer, a free spirit and a socialist, and a humanitarian activist rescued from obscurity via this important gesture of canon revision. Zipes's informative introduction traces Hermynia Zur Mühlen's unconventional artistic career. Born in Vienna in 1883 to an aristocratic Catholic family, she rebels from her early childhood against the arbitrary social codes of her elitist upbringing. At age eleven, she founds with her friends a political group called the Anchor Society that sets the ambitious goal "to improve the world" by fighting hegemonic oppression and speaking the truth in the face of hypocrisy. After her despotic father prevents her from becoming a schoolteacher, she marries an Estonian baron from Germany against her parents' will, but the relationship is embittered by ideological differences and her worsening tuberculosis. Eventually, at a Swiss health clinic, she meets the politically likeminded Austrian translator Stefan Klein who becomes her lifelong partner and collaborator in changing the world through writing literary texts (excelling in many genres from political fairy tales to mystery novels and social problem novels), nonfiction pieces, and translating political works to propagate the cause of the German Communist Party. It is by Klein's side that Zur Mühlen [End Page 319] matures—amid poor living conditions, rejected by her family, often persecuted by the police, and against all odds—into the artist-activist who boldly abandons her class to become an outspoken, prolific left-wing author driven by the agenda to share revolutionary ideas with both adult and child readers of her provocative fairy tales. In her analytical essays, Zur Mühlen criticized the trivial and demeaning literature for girls and emphasized the role of children's literature in socializing youngsters, in educating social sensibility, and in functioning as an instrument for the intergenerational discussion of significant social problems. Her first major pioneering efforts in the realm of fairy tales were governed by the pedagogical intent to renew the genre of children's literature, yet the discussion of serious themes—like social injustice, discrimination, tyranny, class struggle, or solidarity—implies that she strategically addressed a dual readership. She assumed that fairy tales were meant for the collective education of parents and children, for the building of empathetic bonds between different generations and different social classes. The volume contains a selection of Zur Mühlen's seventeen fairy tales. The first three from her What Little Peter's Friends Told Him (1930) belong to the genre of the "it narrative"—popularized by Hans Christian Andersen and E. T. A. Hoffmann—in which different household objects—the coal, the matchbox, and the water bottle—tell stories to poor little Peter, whose leg is broken and is left at home alone while his mother is busy working in the factory. Through their tales, which shed light on the difficult lives of working-class people, the talking, anthropomorphized objects act as witnesses and critics of the objectification of the exploited people, and the dehumanizing strategies of the oppressors. Contrary to the conclusions of today's postmillennial, posthumanist or object-oriented ontological theories, the blurring of the distinction between subject and object, human and thing is more tragic than liberating in Zur...

The Home of the Dispossessed

The objects that people interact with on a daily basis speak to and of these people who acquire, display, and handle them—the relationship is one of exchange. People living among household objects come to care for their things, identify with them, and think of them as a constituent part of themselves. A meaningful problem arises, however, when people who have deep connections to the objects that populate their lived spaces are not those who possess the legal rights of ownership. These individuals and groups—usually excluded from the realm of property ownership along lines of gender, race, and ethnicity—live on an axis of property precarity, persistently subject to the anxieties as well as the realities of dispossession. This Article’s launching point to explore these dispossessions is Henry James’ novel, The Spoils of Poynton, which involves a dispute about the settlement of a father’s estate and describes the battle between mother and son over the furnishings of the family home, Poynton. On a descriptive level, The Spoils of Poynton is a novel about a wife’s dispossession and the gendered nature of inheritance. The novel is also, however, about the exclusions built into property theories of labor and personhood. Accordingly, this Article explicates tactics of dispossession inherent in traditional theories of property ownership, explores the legal claims made to property ownership by those who have been dispossessed, and analyzes the ways in which the meaning of property for these individuals and communities is reconstituted within the political imaginary. The novel therefore tells the story not only of a property conflict between mother and son but also of how individuals who straddle the fragile boundary between personhood and objecthood both experience property as liminal fragments of the rightsholder they could have been and perform their property ownership as a political declaration. In this way, the novel tells the story of what it is like to live in the home of the dispossessed.

Japan Beyond the Kimono: Innovation and Tradition in the Kyoto Textile Industry by Jenny Hall

Reviewed by: Japan Beyond the Kimono: Innovation and Tradition in the Kyoto Textile Industry by Jenny Hall Kaori Nakano (bio) Japan Beyond the Kimono: Innovation and Tradition in the Kyoto Textile Industry. By Jenny Hall. Bloomsbury, 2020. xxiv, 243 pages. $115.00, cloth; $36.95, paper; $33.25, E-book. It has been two years since the COVID-19 pandemic began at the end of March 2020, bringing international travel to a standstill. Until then, the Japanese fashion world had regularly traveled overseas to view new collections and exhibitions. Designers from other countries also visited Japan to promote their work, and reports on their latest offerings occupied the mainstream of Japanese fashion news. Suddenly, all of this came to a screeching halt. As if to fill this gap, the focus in Japan shifted to Japanese fashion brands and traditional Japanese culture—which, admittedly, were always present, but often went unnoticed and unremarked, obscured by the prestige of Western fashion. Today, however, Japanese fashion brands and luxury goods associated with traditional Japanese culture are increasingly featured in the fashion news, and many Japanese are beginning to "discover" and pay attention to the beauty and charm of their native tradition. The kimono is one of the products of Japanese culture that is attracting renewed attention at home. This reawakening of Japan to its own cultural legacy can perhaps be seen as a kind of de-colonization. Appearing fortuitously at this moment when the Japanese are taking a new interest in their fashion and its tradition, Jenny Hall's Japan Beyond the Kimono is an epochal and comprehensive exploration of the past, present, and future of the kimono and its world. Sustainability has become an important touchstone in recent years, but kimono were sustainable long before the term became a buzzword. Along with the knowledge for their proper wear and care, kimono are handed down through the generations from mother to daughter. When the fabric eventually begins to show signs of wear, the kimono will be refashioned into a cushion cover or other household object. As it finally reaches the end of its useful life, it will be recycled as a cleaning rag. The kimono is not just sustainable, it also endorses body diversity. Consisting of several rectangles of fabric, the kimono gently wraps bodies of all shapes, without forcing them into some oppressive "ideal" form. At a recent body diversity fashion show in Japan, a celebrity with prosthetic hands and legs wore a kimono, the body-positive garment creating an elegance that would not have been possible with a Western suit. Supporting sustainability, body diversity, and local industry, the kimono is in the limelight as a garment for our times. [End Page 255] And yet some, invoking the kimono's long tradition and historical weight, still insist on dogmatic rules for wearing kimono. These ultraconservative guardians—the "kimono police"—are always on the alert for any violations of the "proper" way to wear kimono and are eager to enforce orthodoxy. Lacking confidence about the proper way to wear kimono, most Japanese today are increasingly reluctant to don them on a daily basis. The kimono is now mostly limited to ceremonial occasions and special events, for which people call on a professional kimono master and hairdresser to dress them properly. Such formal kimono are often too tight and rigid to allow any extended activity and can even be hard to breathe in—another reason the kimono has come to be shunned as everyday wear. If the situation of the prospective kimono wearer is so daunting, the outlook for the kimono producer is even bleaker. A lack of successors to the elderly kimono craftspeople of the previous generation is putting many kimono workshops in danger of closure, and the precious lineage of traditional technical know-how is at risk of being severed. Most Japanese today are ignorant about both the kimono and the industry that produces it. While there are many books teaching the proper way to wear kimono, there are few books offering comprehensive information about the cultural significance of kimono or its industry, and probably very few Japanese even know how kimonos are actually made and distributed. Japan Beyond the Kimono investigates...

Syntheses, homeomorphic and configurational isomerizations, and structures of macrocyclic aliphatic dibridgehead diphosphines; molecules that turn themselves inside out.

The diphosphine complexes cis- or trans-[upper bond 1 start]PtCl2(P((CH2) n )3P[upper bond 1 end]) (n = b/12, c/14, d/16, e/18) are demetalated by MC[triple bond, length as m-dash]X nucleophiles to give the title compounds (P((CH2) n )3)P (3b-e, 91-71%). These "empty cages" react with PdCl2 or PtCl2 sources to afford trans-[upper bond 1 start]MCl2(P((CH2) n )3P[upper bond 1 end]). Low temperature 31P NMR spectra of 3b and c show two rapidly equilibrating species (3b, 86 : 14; 3c, 97 : 3), assigned based upon computational data to in,in (major) and out,out isomers. These interconvert by homeomorphic isomerizations, akin to turning articles of clothing inside out (3b/c: ΔH ‡ 7.3/8.2 kcal mol-1, ΔS ‡ -19.4/-11.8 eu, minor to major). At 150 °C, 3b, c, e epimerize to (60-51) : (40-49) mixtures of (in,in/out,out) : in,out isomers, which are separated via the bis(borane) adducts 3b, c, e·2BH3. The configurational stabilities of in,out-3b, c, e preclude phosphorus inversion in the interconversion of in,in and out,out isomers. Low temperature 31P NMR spectra of in,out-3b, c reveal degenerate in,out/out,in homeomorphic isomerizations (ΔG ‡ Tc 12.1, 8.5 kcal mol-1). When (in,in/out,out)-3b, c, e are crystallized, out,out isomers are obtained, despite the preference for in,in isomers in solution. The lattice structures are analyzed, and the D 3 symmetry of out,out-3c enables a particularly favorable packing motif. Similarly, (in,in/out,out)-3c, e·2BH3 crystallize in out,out conformations, the former with a cycloalkane solvent guest inside.

UPCYCLING USING ELEMENTS OF SCRAP VEHICLES

Upcycling is the transformation of used materials/objects into new objects and/or materials of better quality, with a different function and often with better environmental value. Upcycling products are individually manufactured and mostly consist of repurposed objects. Thanks to the creative process, old parts, in particular parts from scrapped vehicles, are transformed into aesthetically new forms and functions. Upcycling reuses existing materials, saves raw materials, conserves energy and has a higher environmental benefit. The purpose of the article is to reveal the possibilities of upcycling, as one of the types of eco-design for creating designer items from scrapped vehicle parts. Modern methods of creating household objects from vehicle parts were evaluated by the method of analysis of literary sources. Based on a comparison of existing upcycling projects, design approaches applied to create new items from existing items are determined. If we consider upcycling from the point of view of object design, then the main task when building a product is to create a complete image while maintaining a balance of aesthetics and responsible production. To achieve such a result, form-forming, compositional coordination of the component parts of the object is necessary. In the case of upcycling, the need to create a complete image from already existing things, considering that in general, they all previously belonged to different products, each of which was created according to the laws of design and had its own character, represents the main challenge for the designer. Based on the analysis of the examples, it was found that in order to obtain an interesting result, as a rule, it is necessary to abstract from the initial purpose of the components, looking at them as a «raw» material. But in some cases where the previous object had a very special purpose, this «character» can enhance the new object if used associatively. This technique requires the designer to work professionally with the form. The simplest way seems to be replicative, where a recognizable part is taken from an iconic design object and compositionally coordinated with additional design elements. Techniques are proposed for harmonizing the «character» of all parts involved in one product.

Development and Usability Testing of a Finger Grip Enhancer for the Elderly

As people age, their finger function deteriorates due to muscle, nerve, and brain degeneration. While exercises might delay this deterioration, an invention that enhances elderly people’s pinching abilities is essential. This study aims to design and develop a finger grip enhancer that facilitates the day-to-day pinching activities of elderly people. This research is an extension of a previous study that conceptualised a finger grip enhancer. The device facilitates finger flexion on the thumb and index finger, and weighs 520 g, allowing for improved portability and sufficient force exertion (13.9 N) for day-to-day pinching. To test for usability, eleven subjects aged 65 years and above performed a pinch-lift-hold test on various household objects. The pinch force before and after utilising the device was measured. Using Minitab 18, the statistical significance of using this device was analysed with a paired-samples t-test. With this device, the elderly people’s pinching abilities significantly improved in both pinch force and pinch force steadiness (p < 0.05). The proposed device has the potential to enhance elderly people’s quality of life by supporting a firm pinch in the handling of everyday objects. This research has applicational value in developing exoskeleton devices for patients who require rehabilitation.

Real-time pixel-wise grasp affordance prediction based on multi-scale context information fusion

PurposeThis paper aims to use fully convolutional network (FCN) to predict pixel-wise antipodal grasp affordances for unknown objects and improve the grasp detection performance through multi-scale feature fusion.Design/methodology/approachA modified FCN network is used as the backbone to extract pixel-wise features from the input image, which are further fused with multi-scale context information gathered by a three-level pyramid pooling module to make more robust predictions. Based on the proposed unify feature embedding framework, two head networks are designed to implement different grasp rotation prediction strategies (regression and classification), and their performances are evaluated and compared with a defined point metric. The regression network is further extended to predict the grasp rectangles for comparisons with previous methods and real-world robotic grasping of unknown objects.FindingsThe ablation study of the pyramid pooling module shows that the multi-scale information fusion significantly improves the model performance. The regression approach outperforms the classification approach based on same feature embedding framework on two data sets. The regression network achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy (up to 98.9%) and speed (4 ms per image) and high success rate (97% for household objects, 94.4% for adversarial objects and 95.3% for objects in clutter) in the unknown object grasping experiment.Originality/valueA novel pixel-wise grasp affordance prediction network based on multi-scale feature fusion is proposed to improve the grasp detection performance. Two prediction approaches are formulated and compared based on the proposed framework. The proposed method achieves excellent performances on three benchmark data sets and real-world robotic grasping experiment.

Factors associated with early childhood development in municipalities of Ceará, Brazil: a hierarchical model of contexts, environments, and nurturing care domains in a cross-sectional study

This study aims to identify the contexts, environments, and nurturing care predictors that determine whether a child is developmentally on track in Ceará, Brazil. We analysed data from a cross-sectional study conducted with caregivers of 6,447 children aged 0-59 months during a vaccination campaign in Ceará in October 2019. The validated Child Development Assessment Questionnaire was used to assess early childhood development (ECD) and children with a z-score ≥ -1 SD were considered developmentally on track. We conducted logistic regression models to understand the effects of contexts, environments, and nurturing care domains on ECD. Children in the early years (< 36 months) were more likely to meet the ECD milestones if they were not born with low birth weight (AOR: 0·64; 95% CI: 0·42-0·97), were exposed to manufactured toys in their house (2·68; 1·97-3·66), their heads of household were employed (1·61; 1·16-2·23), and their caregivers had read the Child Health Handbook (1·42; 1·13-1·77) and engaged them in stimulating activities (1·71; 1·26-2·32). Children aged 36-59 months were more likely to meet the ECD milestones if they were breastfed (never: ref. / < 3 months: 3·72; 1·91-7·26 / 3-5 months: 3·21; 1·74-5·93 / 6-11 months: 3·73; 1·95-7·16 / ≥ 12 months: 3·89; 2·25-6·72), had books at home (0: ref / 1-3: 1·71; 1·22-2·40 / 4-6: 2·24; 1·27-3·94 / 7+: 2·71; 1·05-7·00), and their caregivers received information about ECD (1·49; 1·11-2·01) and engaged them in stimulating activities (1·80; 1·27-2·56). Children aged 36-59 months were less likely to meet developmental milestones if they watched TV or used tablets/smartphones for more than two hours per day (0·61; 0·44-0·84), played with household objects (0·62; 0·41-0·92), participated in governmental early childhood programmes aimed at vulnerable families (0·62; 0·45-0·86), had families that participated in income transfer programmes (0·68; 0·47-0·99) (families living in poverty or extreme poverty), and their caregivers considered slapping (0·67; 0·48-0·94) a necessary disciplinary method. Having favourable socioeconomic conditions, breastfeeding, the absence of harsh discipline, caregivers who provide responsive care, and the provision of opportunities for early learning are the key factors that increase the likelihood of a child achieving their full developmental potential in Ceará, Brazil. This study was supported by the Maria Cecília Souto Vidigal Foundation (F0245), Brazil. The funder had no role in the design, analysis, or writing of this article.

The University of Colorado Virtual Physical Examination for Spine Surgeons: A Preliminary Study.

As coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) reached pandemic status, in-person orthopedic clinics across the United States were forced to close as many states adopted stay-at-home orders. Previously, the use of telemedicine in orthopedic practices was minimal for a variety of reasons, one being the inability to perform a physical examination in a specialty reliant on direct patient contact for diagnosis and treatment. A prospective cohort of 52 patients consented to participate in a novel virtual physical examination protocol during routine telemedicine visits at a large, tertiary orthopedic spine practice. Participants were asked to perform a series of carefully designed physical maneuvers using readily available household objects to allow their provider to better assess sensory and motor function in the tele-medicine setting. Patients were then asked to complete a short satisfaction survey. In total, 52 patients completed the physical examination and survey. Males and females were distributed evenly among the cohort at 50%. The mean age was 52.1±15.5 years. The average score for ease of understanding the examination (1=easiest, 5=hardest) was 1.1, while the average score for ease of performance was 1.5. Most participants (97.56%) felt their provider was better able to understand their condition using the virtual examination findings. This study highlights the utility of a virtual physical examination for assessment of spine patients in the telemedicine setting. Furthermore, this study illustrates the ease with which such an examination can be implemented and performed to improve patient evaluation and satisfaction. [Orthopedics. 2022;45(1):e7-e10.].

What's in the refrigerator? Using an adapted material culture approach to understand health practices and eating habits in the home

Health researchers have long acknowledged the limitations of self-reporting in studies of health in the home and have consequently sought various methods to broaden research beyond self-reporting in efficient and productive ways. Our two independent research studies, one in Copenhagen, Denmark (2015), and one in Providence County, Rhode Island, in the United States (2015–2016), illustrate how health researchers can adapt an everyday material culture approach used in anthropology to fit the needs of health and wellbeing studies, particularly when it comes to home-based research on health behavior. Our two studies both utilized one particular household object—the refrigerator—to help explore everyday eating habits in various types of households. By analyzing these separate studies together, we found that using the refrigerator in object-elicitation exercises and photographing the refrigerator provided insights that enhanced the interview process, thereby efficiently addressing some of the limitations of interviews and self-reporting. We also found that the refrigerator was a useful comparative tool both within our individual studies and across our research contexts. We conclude that the refrigerator and other everyday use objects are useful methodological tools in health-related studies in the home, and propose that regularly utilizing the refrigerator may help researchers interpret qualitative data about nutrition and eating habits.

Grasp detection via visual rotation object detection and point cloud spatial feature scoring

Accurately detecting the appropriate grasp configurations is the central task for the robot to grasp an object. Existing grasp detection methods usually overlook the depth image or only regard it as a two-dimensional distance image, which makes it difficult to capture the three-dimensional structural characteristics of target object. In this article, we transform the depth image to point cloud and propose a two-stage grasp detection method based on candidate grasp detection from RGB image and spatial feature rescoring from point cloud. Specifically, we first adopt the recently proposed high-performance rotation object detection method for aerial images, named R3Det, to grasp detection task, obtaining the candidate grasp boxes and their appearance scores. Then, point clouds within each candidate grasp box are normalized and evaluated to get the point cloud quality scores, which are fused with the established point cloud quantity scoring model to obtain spatial scores. Finally, appearance scores and their corresponding spatial scores are combined to output high-quality grasp detection results. The proposed method effectively fuses three types of grasp scoring modules, thus is called Score Fusion Grasp Net. Besides, we propose and adopt top-k grasp metric to effectively reflect the success rate of algorithm in actual grasp execution. Score Fusion Grasp Net obtains 98.5% image-wise accuracy and 98.1% object-wise accuracy on Cornell Grasp Dataset, which exceeds the performances of state-of-the-art methods. We also use the robotic arm to conduct physical grasp experiments on 15 kinds of household objects and 11 kinds of adversarial objects. The results show that the proposed method still has a high success rate when facing new objects.

Ethnobotanical Knowledge of an Eskimo Family: Naukan Yupiks [Etnobotanicheskoe znanie odnoi eskimosskoi sem’i: naukanskie yupiki

This article analyzes the Naukan Yupiks ethnobotanical knowledge, i.e. the use of plants as food, medicine, household or ritual objects, on the example of one family. The resettlement from Cape Dezhnev to other settlements led to significant changes in their culture and language proficiency. Fieldwork was carried out in summer 2014 in the village of Uelen, Chukotka, using the methods of structured interviews and participant observation. Informants named 26 species belonging to 18 families; these species gave a total of 170 plant uses. Within one family, there is a sharp decline in the knowledge of the Naukan phytonyms, as well as the repertoire of plants used from older generations to younger ones. The disappearing knowledge includes the collection of plant roots harvested by tundra voles. However, aerial parts of plants, berries, and algae remain popular. The variety of methods for preparing plants is increasing, including due to contact with the Russian-speaking population and access to new technologies.