University of Memphis

About: University of Memphis is a education organization based out in Memphis, Tennessee, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 7710 authors who have published 20082 publications receiving 611618 citations. The organization is also known as: U of M.

Predictors of weight gain in the Pound of Prevention study

Abstract: OBJECTIVES: This study examined cross-sectional and prospective relationships between macronutrient intake, behaviors intended to limit fat intake, physical activity and body weight. DESIGN: The overall goal was to identify diet and exercise behaviors that predict and/or accompany weight gain or loss over time. Specific questions addressed included: (a) are habitual levels of diet or exercise predictive of weight change; (b) are habitual diet and exercise levels associated cross-sectionally with body weight; and (c) are changes in diet and exercise associated with changes in body weight over time? PARTICIPANTS: Subjects were a sample of community volunteers (n=826 women, n=218 men) taking part in a weight gain prevention project over a 3-year period. MEASURES: Body weight was measured at baseline and annually over the study period. Self-report measures of diet and exercise behavior were also measured annually. RESULTS: Among both men and women, the most consistent results were the positive association between dietary fat intake and weight gain and an inverse association between frequency of physical activity and weight gain. Individuals who weighed more both ate more and exercised less than those who weighed less. Individuals who increased their physical activity level and decreased their food intake over time were protected from weight gain compared to those who did not. Frequency of high-intensity physical activity was particularly important for both men and women. Additionally, women who consistently engaged in higher levels of moderate physical activity gained weight at a slower rate compared to women who were less active. CONCLUSIONS: Overall results indicated that both cross-sectionally and prospectively, the determinants of weight and weight change are multifactorial. Attention to exercise, fat intake and total energy intake all appear important for successful long term control of body weight.

Reference standards for flow cytometry and application in comparative studies of nuclear DNA content

Abstract: Nuclear DNA mass in cells from a reference species can be used to obtain high-resolution estimates of DNA mass from a target species. In our study of DNA mass in cells from 45 selected species, representing each of the major vertebrate classes, we have obtained values of from 1.5 to 110.0 pg of DNA. Because values in or near this range would be expected in the study of nuclear DNA mass in vertebrates and other organisms, the species in this report can provide a useful catalogue of references for comparative studies of DNA.

Recognition of facial expressions and measurement of levels of interest from video

Abstract: This paper presents a spatio-temporal approach in recognizing six universal facial expressions from visual data and using them to compute levels of interest. The classification approach relies on a two-step strategy on the top of projected facial motion vectors obtained from video sequences of facial expressions. First a linear classification bank was applied on projected optical flow vectors and decisions made by the linear classifiers were coalesced to produce a characteristic signature for each universal facial expression. The signatures thus computed from the training data set were used to train discrete hidden Markov models (HMMs) to learn the underlying model for each facial expression. The performances of the proposed facial expressions recognition were computed using five fold cross-validation on Cohn-Kanade facial expressions database consisting of 488 video sequences that includes 97 subjects. The proposed approach achieved an average recognition rate of 90.9% on Cohn-Kanade facial expressions database. Recognized facial expressions were mapped to levels of interest using the affect space and the intensity of motion around apex frame. Computed level of interest was subjectively analyzed and was found to be consistent with "ground truth" information in most of the cases. To further illustrate the efficacy of the proposed approach, and also to better understand the effects of a number of factors that are detrimental to the facial expression recognition, a number of experiments were conducted. The first empirical analysis was conducted on a database consisting of 108 facial expressions collected from TV broadcasts and labeled by human coders for subsequent analysis. The second experiment (emotion elicitation) was conducted on facial expressions obtained from 21 subjects by showing the subjects six different movies clips chosen in a manner to arouse spontaneous emotional reactions that would produce natural facial expressions.

FungalTraits: a user-friendly traits database of fungi and fungus-like stramenopiles

Abstract: The cryptic lifestyle of most fungi necessitates molecular identification of the guild in environmental studies. Over the past decades, rapid development and affordability of molecular tools have tremendously improved insights of the fungal diversity in all ecosystems and habitats. Yet, in spite of the progress of molecular methods, knowledge about functional properties of the fungal taxa is vague and interpretation of environmental studies in an ecologically meaningful manner remains challenging. In order to facilitate functional assignments and ecological interpretation of environmental studies we introduce a user friendly traits and character database FungalTraits operating at genus and species hypothesis levels. Combining the information from previous efforts such as FUNGuild and Fun(Fun) together with involvement of expert knowledge, we reannotated 10,210 and 151 fungal and Stramenopila genera, respectively. This resulted in a stand-alone spreadsheet dataset covering 17 lifestyle related traits of fungal and Stramenopila genera, designed for rapid functional assignments of environmental studies. In order to assign the trait states to fungal species hypotheses, the scientific community of experts manually categorised and assigned available trait information to 697,413 fungal ITS sequences. On the basis of those sequences we were able to summarise trait and host information into 92,623 fungal species hypotheses at 1% dissimilarity threshold.