Are school uniforms associated with gender inequalities in physical activity? A pooled analysis of population-level data from 135 countries/regions

Purpose:It is aimed to assess whether school uniforms are associated with population-level gender inequalities in physical activity,and whether associations differ by school level,country/region income,and assessment method.Methods:An ecological study design was employed.We collected data about global uniform practices using an online survey.We searched for country/region-level estimates of school-aged youth meeting physical activity guidelines from international surveillance studies.Study selection was conducted in duplicate using a systematic process,and a random sample of all data was checked to ensure extraction and pooling processes were accurate.We calculated absolute and relative gender inequalities in physical activity for each country.Linear regression examined associations between country/region-level uniform practices(binary yes/no exposure variable)and country/region-level gender inequalities in physical activity guideline compliance(absolute and relative inequalities).We investigated moderation by school level,stratified analyses by income group,and repeated primary analyses using device-measured data.Results:Pooling data from 135 countries/regions(n=1,089,852),we found no association between population-level uniform practices and gender inequalities in physical activity across all ages(absolute:b=-0.2;95%confidence interval(95%CI):-1.7 to 1.3,p=0.74;relative:b=0.1;95%CI:-0.1 to 0.2,p=0.51).Subgroup analysis suggested a positive association in primary school settings(absolute:b=4.3;95%CI:-0.0 to 8.6,p=0.05).Among high-income countries,absolute inequalities were significantly greater in countries/regions with uniform practices(N=37)compared to those without(N=48)(9.1(SD=3.6)vs.7.8 percentage points(SD=4.3)).Repeating analyses using device-measured data(n=32,130;N=24)did not alter our primary finding.From initial descriptive statistics,we found that in countries/regions where a majority of schools(>50%)reportedly use uniforms,there was lower compliance with physical activity guidelines among all genders(median:16.0%,interquartile range:13.2%-19.9%,N=103)compared to generally non-uniform countries/regions(median:19.5%,interquartile range:16.4%-23.5%,N=32)(z=3.04,p=0.002).(N=countries,regions and studies represented;n=sample size or participants included).Conclusion:School uniforms are associated with greater gender inequalities in physical activity in primary school settings and in high-income countries.Our population-level findings warrant testing using individual-level data across contexts.

CoS Nanosheets Coated with Dopamine-Derived Carbon Standing on Carbon Fiber Cloth as Binder-Free Anode for Li-ion Batteries

Cobalt sulphides attract much attention as anode materials for Li-ion batteries(LIBs).However,its poor conductivity,low initial column efficiency and large volume changes during cycling have hindered its further development.Herein,novel interlaced CoS nanosheets were firstly prepared on Carbon Fiber Cloth(CFC)by two hydrothermal reactions followed with carbon coating via carbonizing dopamine(CoS NS@C/CFC).As a freestanding anode,the nanosheet structure of CoS not only accommodates the volume variation,but also provides a large interface area to proceed the charge transfer reaction.In addition,CFC works as both a three-dimensional skeleton and an active substance which can further improve the areal capacity of the resulting electrode.Furthermore,the coated carbon combined with the CFC work as a 3D conductive network to facilitate the electron conduction.The obtained CoS NS@C/CFC,and the contrast sample prepared with the same procedure but without carbon coating(CoS NS/CFC),are characterized with XRD,SEM,TEM,XPS and electrochemical measurements.The results show that the CoS NS@C/CFC possesses much improved electrochemical performance due to the synergistic effect of nanosheet CoS,the coated carbon and the CFC substrate,exhibiting high initial columbic efficiency(~87%),high areal capacity(2.5 at 0.15 mA cm−2),excellent rate performance(1.6 at 2.73 mA cm−2)and improved cycle stability(87.5%capacity retention after 300 cycles).This work may provide a new route to explore freestanding anodes with high areal specific capacity for LIBs.

Carbon Emissions Embodied in China’s International Trade of Textiles and Clothing

International trade of textiles and clothing has numerous environmental implications, such as carbon leakage. In order to estimate the CO2 emissions embodied in China's imports and exports of textiles and clothing, an empirical analysis was carried out with environmental input-output analysis (EIOA) method using the most recent data available. The results indicate that China is a net exporter of embodied CO2 emissions on account of its international trade of textiles and clothing. The amount of the net exported embodied CO2 emissions increases from 110 million metric tons(Mt) of CO2 in 2002 to 280 Mt of CO2 in 2011. In particular, United States, Japan, and European Union transfer to China 339 Mt of CO2, 291 Mt of CO2 and 396 Mt of CO2 respectively during the period of 2002 -2011.

Marketing Strategies in the Clothing Industry

Chinese clothing industry has stepped into a new era when the fierce competition,the internationalization and the pluralism coexist.If the clothing enterprises want to catch the market opportunities,and stand out in the clothing industry,they should change their traditional marketing concepts and build a customers-oriented marketing strategy.

Preliminary Risk Assessment Posed by Formaldehyde Residues in Clothing to Vietnamese Consumers

The assessment of potential health risks posed by formaldehyde in clothing to consumers is of increasing concern worldwide. Because of this, it is necessary to develop an exposure model that can realistically mimic clothes wearing conditions. This study aims to preliminarily develop a health risk assessment model for formaldehyde in clothing, and then to assess the potential health risk posed by formaldehyde in textiles to adults and infants in Vietnam using the model. Finally, this study aims to examine the plausibility of the adopted permissible values for formaldehyde in cloth- ing in Vietnam. In the model, two exposure factors for dermal exposure and overall exposure routes, i.e. sweat type and perspiration area, were considered. The margins of exposure (MOE) were calculated to estimate the health risks from worst case and average exposures. The assessment shows that acute exposure via inhalation can pose health risks to Vietnamese consumers in both cases. In regards to chronic exposure, dermal exposure is about four (for infants) and seven (for adults) times higher than exposure via inhalation, but no risks were found for average exposure. If a MOE of 100 is defined as ‘safe’ used, dermal and total chronic exposure to worst case cause potential risks, whereas no health risks were found for exposure to average case. With the model, the adopted Vietnamese permissible values for formaldehyde in clothing were assessed as not posing a health risk to Vietnamese consumers, hence they are accepted.

Attitudes of hospitalized patients toward wearing patient clothing in Tianjin,China:A cross-sectional survey

Objective:To assess the attitudes of hospitalized patients toward wearing patient clothing and identify the factors those influence their negative attitudes.Methods:A cross-sectional design was employed and a questionnaire survey was conducted.The data were collected from 251 hospitalized patients between July 2015 and August 2015.Results:Around 57.8%of the participants reported that they were unwilling to wear patient clothing.Among them,60.7%knew little to nothing about the function of patient clothing.Some of these patients were unwilling to wear patient clothing because these uniforms had poor comfort(26.2%),fit(34.5%),hygiene(66.2%),and appearance(31.1%),and wearing them was psychologically uncomfortable(43.5%).Conclusions:More than half of the hospitalized patients dislike wearing patient clothing because they were unaware of its functions and were skeptical about its hygiene,comfortability,fit,and appearance.Therefore,these patients must be provided with comfortable,well fitting,hygienic,and aesthetically pleasing clothing.

DEVELOPMENT OF AN APPARATUS FOR MEASURING HEAT TRANSFER PROPERTIES OF CLOTHING MATERIALS

In this paper an apparatus for measuring heat transfer properties of clothing materials is re-ported.In comparison with the similar device based on constant temperature method and em-ploying a hot plate,the characteristics of this apparatus are as follows.(1)By using microcomputer as its testing control and data processing center,the testingfunction is strengthened,while much more information can be achieved.(2)By using numerical PID control technique supported with software,the informationabout the transient heat transfer properties of clothing materials can be obtained,while the costlowered.In this paper a brief evaluation of the apparatus is also reported.It shows that its accuracyand repeatability reaches the level of similar commercial device,so to some extent the apparatusis practical.

Implicit Attribute Recognition of Online Clothing Reviews Based on Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit-Conditional Random Fields

Sentiment analysis has been widely used to mine users'opinions on products,product attributes and merchants'response attitudes from online product reviews.One of the key challenges is that the opinion words in some reviews lack obvious evaluation objects(product attributes).This paper aims to identify implicit attributes from online clothing reviews,and presents a unified model which applies a unified tagging scheme.Our model integrates the indicator consistency(IC)module on the basis of bidirectional gated recurrent unit(BiGRU)with a conditional random fields(CRF)layer(BiGRU-CRF),which denoted as BiGRU-IC-CRF.On the 9640 comments data set of a certain clothing brand,the comparative experiment is carried out by BiGRU,BiGRU with an IC layer(BiGRU-IC)and BiGRU-CRF.The results show that this method has a higher recognition rate,and the F1 value reaches 85.48%.The method proposed in this paper is based on character labeling,which effectively avoids the inaccuracy of word segmentation in natural language processing.The IC module proposed in this paper can maintain the consistency of the product attributes corresponding to the opinion words,thereby enhancing the recognition ability of the original BiGRU-CRF method.This method is not only applicable to the implicit attributes recognition in clothing reviews,but also helpful to other fields implicit attribute recognition of product reviews.

Clothing Needs for Wheelchair Users: A Systematic Literature Review

The aim of this study was to identify the clothing needs of wheelchair users using relevant literatures in a global scale and to design a method to classify the clothing needs into a unified system, in order to generate a map of wheelchair users’ clothing needs with the information from multiple resources. The paper reviewed the previous studies about clothing needs and preference of wheelchair users. A three-tier screening was designed to extract main findings from the relevant literature. Content analysis and statistical analysis were used to integrate the information and identify implications. Information was categorized to represent the attributes of the clothing needs. The paper provides comprehensive insights about the specific barriers and abstract demands about the clothing needs of wheelchair users regarding their preference for apparel products. Eight essential attributes relating to the clothing needs of wheelchair users were identified: functional needs, fit attribute fabric and fiber, safety issue, aesthetic needs, expressive needs, quality of life, and extrinsic attributes. The attributes were classified into two general domains, reflecting the physical challenges and psychological desires of wheelchair users.

CHIC: A Bridge For Clothing Trade Between China and Foreign Countries

The 1995 China International Clothing Fair (CHIC) was held from April 24 to 28 in Beijing with 380 enterprises from 20 countries and regions participating. Sponsored by the China Clothing Research and Design Centre, the China International Trade Centre, the Textile Sub-Council of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT), and the China National Textiles Import & Export Corporation, CHIC

Eco-friendly concept:female clothing design inspired by plastic bag's pattern

Environment is facing lots of problems mainly caused by plastic bags.Plastic bags have very harmful effect on environment as they don't dispose of.Recycling is a process in which the waste material can be reused and re-created to give it a new look which also saves money and make environment eco-friendly.This study focuses on conveying eco-friendly fashion concept to the consumers.Inspired by plastic bags'shape and patterns,the author creates a new method of pattern making for female clothing which decorated on different materials.Through design practices and draping experiments,a new ready-to-wear collection shows the more possibility of eco-friendly idea in fashion industry.

Guangzhou Zhonghuan Clothing Accessories Co.

The Guangzhou Zhonghuan Clothing Accessories Company is a special wholesale enterprise for brandname leather clothing accessories with complete varieties and good service. It has senior artists to design trade mark representations and garment accessories with advanced computers. It has a printing house with printing, punching and casting equipment.

Low-cost clothing outlasts expensive pieces

If you’ve been shelling out for designer clothing in the hopes that it will be more durable than cheaper options, you might want to reconsider it. A new study from The University of Leeds suggests that low-cost clothing might actually outlast pricier pieces.

Brujas to promote series of high-quality card clothing

Brujas Textile Tech (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. is a Sino-foreign joint venture manufacturer of card clothing. Brujas, founded in 1908 by the Brujas family in Terrassa Spain, has made a joint venture with White Shark Card Clothing Co., Ltd. since 2008. Brujas is a ISO9001 quality approved company and is known as a high quality card clothing product suitable for all carding applications.

Low-cost clothing outlasts expensive pieces

If you’ve been shelling out for designer clothing in the hopes that it will be more durable than cheaper options, you might want to reconsider it. A new study from The University of Leeds suggests that low-cost clothing might actually outlast pricier pieces.

Clothing Parsing Based on Multi-Scale Fusion and Improved Self-Attention Mechanism

Due to the lack of long-range association and spatial location information,fine details and accurate boundaries of complex clothing images cannot always be obtained by using the existing deep learning-based methods.This paper presents a convolutional structure with multi-scale fusion to optimize the step of clothing feature extraction and a self-attention module to capture long-range association information.The structure enables the self-attention mechanism to directly participate in the process of information exchange through the down-scaling projection operation of the multi-scale framework.In addition,the improved self-attention module introduces the extraction of 2-dimensional relative position information to make up for its lack of ability to extract spatial position features from clothing images.The experimental results based on the colorful fashion parsing dataset(CFPD)show that the proposed network structure achieves 53.68%mean intersection over union(mIoU)and has better performance on the clothing parsing task.

Core Competitiveness Construction of Clothing Brands in Low-Carbon Economy

The climate issue has become an environmental concern for all sectors of the world and the low-carbon economy has thus become a new economic development model to combat climate change.With the development of low-carbon economy era,the textile and clothing industry plays an important role in stabilizing the development of low-carbon economy and society,and China has put forward the development requirements of low-carbon transformation for the textile and clothing industry,and also it has an important strategic value to promote the high-quality development of low-carbon economy and society,and the construction of brands’ core competitiveness is an inevitable choice for clothing brands in the face of the new form of international competition.As a result,the evaluation indicator of clothing brands’ core competitiveness in the low-carbon economy is used to measure the core competitiveness of clothing brands.Based on the corresponding verification results obtained by analytic hierarchy process(AHP) analysis,it can guide the low-carbon development of the clothing industry,thus proposing a more reasonable way to build the core competitiveness of clothing brands.It can promote the low-carbon transformation and upgrading of the clothing industry,effectively increase the market share of clothing brands,and promote the high-quality development of clothing brands.

The development of anti-fall functional clothing for elderly

Objective:The consequences of falls in the elderly are severe,ranging from skin abrasion to hip fracture,which is very easy to cause death.Using advanced technology to develop anti-fall clothing that meets the needs of the elderly can play a significant role in protecting the elderly.By reviewing and analyzing the existing literature on the importance of fall protection clothing in reducing falls and protecting the body of the elderly,it is hoped to explore further research that needs improvement.Methods:Guided by the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses,eight related studies were identified through Web of Science,Scopus and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure.The research objects,approaches,material and equipment,protection principle,and survey results are extracted.Results:Two articles verified the fall detection algorithm adopted in the research through experiments,which significantly improved fall detection accuracy.Six papers found that selecting appropriate cushioning materials can effectively reduce the consequences of falls of the elderly through experimental comparative analysis.Finally,three attributes for significant design value are drawn:(1)size and fit;(2)cushioning materials;(3)wearable sensing elements.

2023 National Textile and Clothing Standards Innovation Conference held

The 2023 National Textile and Clothing Standards Innovation Conference convened in Tai’an city,Shandong province on August 18-20,where national experts in this field gathered to discuss the innovative development of the standards system for China’s textile and clothing.

Korea's Textile and Clothing Industry still Sees China as a Major Trading Partner——Meeting with Mr.Myeng-keun Ha,V.Chairman of Korea Federation of Textile industries at the First Private Sector Consultative Committee's Meeting chaired by ITCB(Internation

On June 2-3,International Textile and Clothing Bureau held its inaugural meeting for Private Sector Consultative Committee(PICC)in Geneva on June 2-3 to discuss the issues of common concerns and impacts that challenged textile and clothing sectors against global economic recession.