No abstract

This article examines the influence of sociodemographic and family, friendship, fictive kin, church, and neighbor network variables on two measures of subjective well-being (i.e., life satisfaction and happiness) among a national sample of African Americans. The analyses were conducted on the National Survey of Black Americans, a national cross-section study of the adult (age 18 and older) Black population (N = 2,107). Multivariate analyses revealed that sociodemographic (i.e., age, income, region, health, marital status, urbanicity) and social relations and network factors (i.e., subjective family closeness, support from family, number of friends, presence of fictive kin, church attendance, and frequency of contact with neighbors) were significantly associated with subjective well-being. The findings are discussed in relation to previous work on the sociodemographic, health, and social network correlates of subjective well-being.

Bacterial histidine kinases have been proposed as targets for the discovery of new antibiotics, yet few specific inhibitors of bacterial histidine kinases have been reported. We report here a novel thienopyridine (TEP) compound that inhibits bacterial histidine kinases competitively with respect to ATP but does not comparably inhibit mammalian serine/threonine kinases. Although it partitions into membranes and does not inhibit the growth of bacterial or mammalian cells, TEP could serve as a starting compound for a new class of histidine kinase inhibitors with antibacterial activity.

Abstract-In this paper, we propose an Internet of Things (IoT) system application for remote medical monitoring. The body pressure distribution is acquired through a pressure sensing mattress under the person's body, data is sent to a computer workstation for processing, and results are communicated for monitoring and diagnosis. The area of application of such system is large in the medical domain making the system convenient for clinical use such as in sleep studies, non or partial anesthetic surgical procedures, medical-imaging techniques, and other areas involving the determination of the body-posture on a mattress. In this vein, a novel method for human body posture recognition that consists in providing an optimal combination of signal acquisition, processing, and data storage to perform the recognition task in a quasi-real-time basis. A supervised learning approach was used to build a model using a robust synthetic data. The data has been generated beforehand, in a way to enhance and generalize the recognition capability while maintaining both geometrical and spatial performance. Low-cost and fast computation per sample processing along with autonomy, make the system suitable for long-term operation and IoT applications. The recognition results with a Cohen's Kappa coefficient κ = 0.866 was satisfactorily encouraging for further investigation in this field.

Vulvar swelling is a rare manifestation of metastatic Crohn's disease in children. It often predates gastrointestinal symptoms and can be the first presentation of pediatric Crohn's disease. We report three cases of pediatric Crohn's disease presenting with vulvar swelling. We discuss this rare presentation and its treatment and highlight the importance of recognizing it so that prompt investigation and appropriate management can be initiated.