Contributing to a Healthy Older Population of the Future: Investigating the Daily Walking Steps of Working Adults in Hong Kong

Developing a healthy lifestyle during adulthood is one of the essential factors to prepare for healthy aging. This cross-sectional descriptive study investigated the daily walking steps of 893 working adults from nine occupation categories in Hong Kong. Their daily walking steps were measured using a pedometer. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to compare the difference in daily walking steps between participants in different occupation category. Chi-square test was used to compare the difference in proportion of working adults in each occupation category who walked and did not walk 10,000 steps per day. Results reveal that the participants in average walked 8661 steps per day. “Plant and machine operators and assemblers” and “clerks” were the two least active groups. Participants from the nine occupation categories demonstrated a significant difference in the number of daily walking steps. Post hoc analysis revealed a significant difference between “plant and machine operators and assemblers” and “service workers and shop sales workers” (p < 0.01), as well as between “plant and machine operators and assemblers” and “craft and related workers” (p < 0.01). Participants from the nine occupation categories also demonstrated a significant difference in the proportion of those who walked and did not walk 10,000 steps per day. Owing to a large difference in number of participants in the nine occupation categories and other study limitations, further systematic investigation is indicated to confirm the study results. To summarize, working adults in Hong Kong are only somewhat active. Identifying the factors that deter the working adults from walking and the ways to promote walking among working adults is necessary to prepare a healthy older population of the future.

Experience of Drug Abusers Participating in Community-Based Drug Rehabilitation Services Provided by the Counselling Centres for Psychotropic Substance Abusers (CCPSAs) in Hong Kong

Despite the official statistics showing that the number of drug users has been declining, the problem of drug abuse remains serious in Hong Kong. This problem is evidenced by the trend of hidden and prolonged drug abuse. The recovery of drug abusers is an important process, because the misuse of drugs can cause many bio-psycho-social complications. Therefore, 11 Counselling Centres for Psychotropic Substance Abusers (CCPSAs) in different districts in Hong Kong play an important role on those drug abusers [1]. As a core community-based drug rehabilitation service in Hong Kong, studies about CCPSAs are limited. This study uses a descriptive qualitative approach to explore the experience of drug abusers participating in community-based drug rehabilitation services provided by CCPSAs. Five CCPSA users, who utilized the services for more than two months, participated in the semi-structured face-to-face interviews. Data collected were then analysed by thematic analysis, and five themes were generated: 1) receiving supportive counselling service in CCPSAs, 2) revealing variance towards nonmandatory services in CCPSAs, 3) encountering intrapersonal conflicts when participating in CCPSAs, 4) expanding social network through integration in group activities and 5) wishing to be a companion to other drug abusers. Findings of this study provide valuable insights towards services modification and the enhancement of drug rehabilitation and drug abusers’ wellbeing over the collaboration of healthcare workers, services providers and the media. However, this study has some limitations, and it presents suggestions for future research.

Untranslatability in Onomatopoeia Translation—A Case Study of the Book of Songs

Classical poetry is a kind of special classical literature with highly concise language,rich emotion,profound implication and certain rhythm.The development of poetry translation is related to the spread of Chinese classical culture.There are many opinions about translatability and Untranslatability of poetry translation.The translation of meaning is relatively easy,while the rhetoric technique closely related to the form of expression is more difficult,which is the key to express the poet's feelings.There⁃fore,this paper aims to explore the untranslatability of onomatopoeia in poetry by combining with the Book of Songs.

Pre-training Assessment Through the Web

Web-based training is growing quickly in popularit y for professionals in industrial organizations and large enterprises. The savings in cost and time are significant. The instructor-led trainings are bounded by time and place, not to mention the cost involved in traveling, accommodation and training venue. However, in the most online training courses, all trainees are given same training materials and teaching paradigms. The problem of differentia ting the trainees’ abilities is the main concern. We need a pre-training test t o identify and classify of the weaknesses and strengths of differentiate trainee s so as to devise an appropriate training programs for the trainees. Adaptation of a Web-based Computer adaptive Test (CAT) for the pre-training test make the web-based training more efficient. The advantages of CAT are self-pacing, eff iciency, time and cost saving, immediate scoring and feedback, accuracy and secu rity, etc (Rudner, 1998; UMN, 1999; Novell, 2000; Linacre, 2000; Windowsglore, 2 000). Moreover, Web-based CAT also gives greater flexibility and convenience. T his paper describes how this CAT tool is built, how it helps instructor identify the strengths and weaknesses of trainees, and how to assure quality on the CAT system.

Novel molecular targets in hepatocellular carcinoma

Globally,hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC)is a leading cause of cancer and cancerrelated deaths.The therapeutic efficacy of locoregional and systemic treatment in patients with advanced HCC remains low,which results in a poor prognosis.The development of sorafenib for the treatment of HCC has resulted in a new era of molecular targeted therapy for this disease.However,the median overall survival was reported to be barely higher in the sorafenib treatment group than in the control group.Hence,in this review we describe the importance of developing more effective targeted therapies for the management of advanced HCC.Recent investigations of molecular signaling pathways in several cancers have provided some insights into developing molecular therapies that target critical members of these signaling pathways.Proteins involved in the Hedgehog and Notch signaling pathways,Polo-like kinase 1,arginine,histone deacetylases and Glypican-3 can be potential targets in the treatment of HCC.Monotherapy has limited therapeutic efficacy due to the development of inhibitory feedback mechanisms and induction of chemoresistance.Thus,emphasis is now on the development of personalized and combination molecular targeted therapies that can serve as ideal therapeutic strategies for improved management of HCC.

Ergonomic Evaluation on Taxi Drivers' Compartment

Driving involves long hours of physical work within c onfined compartment. Taxi drivers usually work with prolonged working hours, add itional stress may likely be induced on particular body limbs. Occupational heal th may occur and working efficiency may potentially be affected resulting fr om fatigues, pains or diseases. These problems, however, could be remedied if mo re attention is paid on seating design, the workplace and driving postures adopt ed. Ergonomics design can provide better understanding of those concerned areas. A study was conducted to analyse occupational and health problems related to ta xi drivers. Through ergonomic evaluation of driver’s compartment, the authors m ake recommendations to improve health and safety aspects. Besides, the experienc e of gained from this study using ergonomic design can be extended to other occu pation or products.

On recommendation-aware content caching for 6G:An artificial intelligence and optimization empowered paradigm

Recommendation-aware Content Caching(RCC)at the edge enables a significant reduction of the network latency and the backhaul load,thereby invigorating ubiquitous latency-sensitive innovative services.However,the effectiveness of RCC strategies is highly dependent on explicit information as regards subscribers’content request patterns,the sophisticated caching placement policy,and the personalized recommendation tactics.In this article,we investigate how the potentials of Artificial Intelligence(AI)and optimization techniques can be harnessed to address those core issues and facilitate the full implementation of RCC for the upcoming intelligent 6G era.Towards this end,we first elaborate on the hierarchical RCC network architecture.Then,the devised AI and optimization empowered paradigm is introduced,whereas AI and optimization techniques are leveraged to predict the users’content preferences in real-time situations with the assistance of their historical behavior data and determine the cache pushing and recommendation decision,respectively.Through extensive case studies,we validate the effectiveness of AI-based predictors in estimating users’content preference and the superiority of optimized RCC policies over the conventional benchmarks.At last,we shed light on the opportunities and challenges in the future.

Link Availability Prediction for Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks

One critical issue for routing in cognitive radio ad hoc networks (CRAHNs) is how to select a reliable path for forwarding traffic. This is because mobility may cause radio links to break frequently. The reliability of a path depends on the availability of those links that constitutes the path. In this letter, we present a novel approach to predict the probability of the availability of the link between two cognitive radio nodes. The prediction is achieved by estimating the link activation and spectrum activation probabilities. Our prediction is verified by simulation and proved to be accurate. This study can provide reliability assurance on dynamic routing for cognitive radio ad hoc networks.

Intention-aware for Session-based Recommendation with Multi-channel Network

Session-based recommendation predicts the user’s next action by exploring the item dependencies in an anonymous session.Most of the existing methods are based on the assumption that each session has a single intention,items irrelevant to the single intention will be regarded as noises.However,in real-life scenarios,sessions often contain multiple intentions.This paper designs a multi-channel Intention-aware Recurrent Unit(TARU)network to further mining these noises.The multi-channel TARU explicitly group items into the different channels by filtering items irrelevant to the current intention with the intention control unit.Furthermore,we propose to use the attention mechanism to adaptively generate an effective representation of the session’s final preference for the recommendation.The experimental results on two real-world datasets denote that our method performs well in session recommendation tasks and achieves improvement against several baselines on the general metrics.

In-Home Drug Storage by Older Adults

Globally,in-home drug-storage compliance is often unsatisfactory,especially among older adults,and can lead to negative health outcomes.This study used a cross-sectional and descriptive design to examine inhome drug-storage compliance among older adults.Convenience sampling was used to recruit 117 older adults in Hong Kong.An in-home drugstorage checklist was used to assess the in-home drug-storage environments(light,temperature,and humidity)and drug-storage methods(drug safety,packaging,information,and expiration)of each older adult.The findings showed that Hong Kong older adults’overall compliance rate in drug storage was 87.25%,and their compliance rate for drug-storage methods(84.59%)was lower than that for drug-storage environments(97.02%).Older adults who were of advanced age,who were less educated or who lived alone demonstrated lower in-home drug-storage compliance.This indicates the need to revise existing health-education strategies to encourage in-home drug-storage compliance.Healthcare professionals should assess older adults’drug-storage compliance to identify less compliant subgroups and deliver specific drug-storage support as required.Family members should also be involved in this process.

The Subtitled Translation into English of the Poetry in Chinese Opera-films

诗词歌赋是传统中国戏曲中的特色之一,其美学乃从古到今熔铸了方言与地域文化的智慧结晶。这些中国戏曲中很多都有相关的电影版本,在香港尤其多;当时因应社会需要,这种戏曲电影中有一部分是配有中英文双语字幕的。由于古典诗词较晦涩难懂,这样一来,字幕英译不仅可以把诗化的唱词和对白内容更清晰地展示出来,也能更容易抓住观众的注意力。其中有一些中国戏曲的唱词已经翻译成英语,可惜并非所有的译本都能达到诗歌语感的共鸣。其实,以电影英文字幕形式出现的戏曲曲词,更是寥寥可数,这极可能是因为译者在平衡双语的文化语感和弦外之音方面感到吃力。故此,在把戏曲电影中的唱词翻译为英文字幕时,翻译者必须成为多元文化的桥梁——文化意蕴较重的元素必须顾及之余,又不可丢失字幕与戏曲文本的特定格式。修辞意象、内蕴意涵、着重诗意的翻译缺一不可,因为翻译者也如作者一样,是艺术家。本文会以著名的粤剧戏曲电影《紫钗记》为例,探索英译戏曲电影字幕中的诗化语言问题。

Development and clinical trial of a novel bioactive bone cement

Strontium(Sr)and related compounds have become more attractive in the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis.Previously,we developed a novel bioactive bone cement which is mainly composed of strontium-con-taining hydroxyapatite(Sr-HA)filler and bisphenol A diglycidylether dimethacrylate(Bis-GMA)resin.This bone cement is superior to conventional polymethylmethacrylate(PMMA)bone cement in bioactivity,biocompatibility,and osseointegration.It also has shown sufficient mechanical strength properties for its use in percutaneous vertebro-plasty(PVP)and total hip replacement(THR).In this paper,we review the in vitro,in vivo and clinical evidence for the effectiveness of this bioactive bone cement.