582 research outputs found
Dialectal position of Daan Tibetan spoken in the Naxi cultural area
No full textチベット語が分布する地域の南東端を占める中国雲南省迪慶藏族自治州のさ
らに南に位置する麗江市において，いくつかチベット族の村落が点在する。永
勝県大安納西族彝族郷はその1 つであり，今なお同地のチベット族はチベット
語を話していることが筆者の調査によって判明した。しかしながら長期にわた
るナシ語や漢語の影響を受け，現在では漢語への移行が進み，すでにその話者
数は激減している。
本稿の目的は大安郷のチベット語Daan 方言のカムチベット語における方言所
属を明らかにすることである。この議論は主に方言間の比較によって成立する。
地理的環境や民間伝承を考慮して，比較対象として最も近くに分布する迪慶州
の諸方言を射程に収める。具体的に比較する言語現象は2 点あり，1 つはチベッ
ト文語形式と口語形式との対応関係の分析で，もう1 つは語形式の分析である。
これらの作業を通して，Daan 方言の方言所属を考察する。
本稿の具体的な構成は，まずDaan 方言のチベット文語形式と口語形式との対
応関係を明らかにし，それによって得られた特徴と迪慶州のチベット語方言の
特徴を比較する。そしてDaan 方言に見られる特徴的な語形式を迪慶州のチベッ
ト語方言の例と比較し，考察を加える。考察の結果，Daan 方言はSems-kyi-nyila
方言群全般の特徴と近似し，特に破擦音/摩擦音の発展過程において同方言群の
Melung 下位方言群の特徴と一致することが判明した。There are several villages populated by Tibetans in Lijiang Municipal Region,
the southeastern neighbourhood of Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture,
where the Tibetan language is mainly spoken. The author has found that
the Tibetan inhabitants still use Tibetan in Daan village, Yongsheng County in
Lijiang, but this dialect is close to extinction because of the strong influence of
Naxi and Chinese.
This paper aims to clarify the dialectal position of the Daan dialect of Khams
Tibetan using a comparative method involving both comparison of using a
sound correspondences between spoken forms and Written Tibetan (WrT) in
multiple Tibetan dialects, and also word forms. In consideration of the geographical
situation and the folklore of the Daan Tibetans, the scope of the
dialectal comparison covers the dialects spoken in Diqing Prefecture, which
can be divided into three main groups: Sems-kyi-nyila, nJol and gTorwa. Of
those, the dialects of the Sems-kyi-nyila and nJol groups are compared with the
Daan dialect.
The main matter consists of three parts: sound correspondences between
WrT and the Daan dialect, comparison of the latter with multiple dialects of
Diqing, and comparison of several characteristic word forms. The paper concludes
that the Daan dialect is genetically close to the Sems-kyi-nyila dialect
group, especially to its Melung subgroup, based on the sound development of
the affricate / fricative series.Articledepartmental bulletin pape
Doplor Sleep: Monitoring Hospital Soundscapes for Better Sleep Hygiene
No full textGood sleep is conducive to the recovery process of hospital patients - and yet, in many wards, sleep duration and quality can often be suboptimal, in part due to modifiable hospital-related sounds and noises. At the neurological ward of the Reinier de Graaf hospital in Delft, the Netherlands, we developed and evaluated a prototype information exchange system to raise awareness of specific sounds as disturbing patients' sleep. The system both classifies different relevant sound events and tracks sleep quality (using a Fitbit device). This information is then visualized for patients and staff to present the influence of the soundscape on patients' sleep hygiene in a friendly and comprehensive way. We discuss the design process, including a context study and various evaluations of the technology, interface, and created affordances. Our initial findings indicate that visualizing hospital soundscapes may, indeed, support both patients and staff in their efforts towards better sleep hygiene. Design AestheticsInternet of Thing
Manual Control Adaptation to Variations in Short-Period Natural Frequency and Damping
No full textThis paper presents the results of a human-in-the-loop experiment performed to investigate the effects of variations in aircraft short-period mode characteristics on human operators’ manual control behavior. In the experiment, 15 participants performed a tracking task for a factorial variation in both short-period mode natural frequency (five settings) and damping ratio (three settings). The baseline aircraft dynamics were those of a Cessna Citation aircraft, as used in a number of previous experiments, and the variations in short-period dynamics were chosen to span a range of interest with respect to available handling qualities criteria and Maximum Unnoticed Added Dynamics (MUAD) envelopes. To objectively quantify the induced adaptation of manual control behavior, human operator models were fitted to the collected tracking data. In addition to these control behavior measures also subjective ratings of the noticeability of differences with respect to the baseline aircraft were collected. Overall, the results show consistent adaptation of manual control behavior to variations in both short-period parameters and a worsening of task performance with decreased short-period natural frequency and decreased damping ratio settings. In spite of inconsistencies in the subjective rating data, the overall objective adaptation of manual control dynamics correlates with the subjective noticeability ratings, as well as correspondence of the tested configurations with available MUAD envelopes
Addressing Challenges of Planning in Multimodal Transportation Nodes with Simulation Games
No full textGlobal transportation knows many different modalities – goods arrive from far away places by ship, plane, railway, or truck. Airports and seaports both represent important nodes within the global transportation network. Both show distinct characteristics, but also similarities when it comes to challenges like required flexibility, robustness, reliability and situational awareness of the stakeholders involved. In this article, we introduce two different simulation games addressing some of these challenges in two complex transportation nodes and discuss the qualitative results of user tests with the games. Within a comparative section, we show how simulation games can be used to address the challenges of multimodal transportation.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Policy Analysi
Benchmarking municipal sport policy: The design and execution of a benchmark for municipal policy-makers to evaluate the portfolio sport facilities
No full textThis thesis is focused on benchmarking municipal sport policy. Physical activity is used by the Dutch government as a policy tool to create a healthy society. The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport stimulate people to adopt active life styles in order to combat the prosperity diseases: overweight, diabetes and depression. In benchmarking municipal sport policy there are the following complexities. Firstly complexities related to the governance of municipal sport policy, there are many actors involved with contradictory interests. In addition municipal sport policy is focussed within municipal boundaries and evolves on previously pursued policies. Secondly complexities related to benchmarking. Benchmarking is from origin a method developed for the industrial industry and now is also applied in the public sector, but the applicability of the method is contested. Moreover benchmarking is not straightforward and is dependent on its design, data reliability and the way of processing data. An essential actor in sport policy are the municipalities: they conduct sport policy in order to heave healthy citizens and focus their policy to a large extent on sport facilities. Currently municipalities lack insight in whether the output of the sport policy (namely the quantity, type, and location of sport facilities) leads to the desired effects (namely healthy citizens), which we define as a lack of insight in the effectiveness of the sport policy. This insight is crucial for municipalities, since it can be used in the policy evaluation to assess the performance of their policy.A method that has been proven useful for measuring and comparing of performance is benchmarking. Benchmarking is the research in which the output between organisations can be compared. However, there is a lack of literature describing how sport policy by municipalities can be compared, whereas comparison with other municipalities can provide additional insights and stimulate learning. In this study a benchmarking method for municipal sport policy aspects is developed and conducted.The benchmarking method is designed based on a benchmarking literature review. Based on the review it was established that the design of the benchmarking method consists of phases, process steps and criteria. Subsequently with the literature review a benchmarking model is designed consisting of phases, steps, and criteria directed at assessing the performance of municipal sport policy. In the benchmarking criteria common elements are: the usage of indicators, transparency in performance measurement method and self-assessment of performance. In the benchmarking models common process steps are: set objectives, define indicators, select benchmark groups, collecting data, preparing data, analyzing data, determining significant different findings and reporting findings. With the designed benchmarking model the benchmark is conducted, resulting in the following findings. The benchmarking results found no significant correlation between the dimensions, the output and the outcome of municipal sport policy. This study found that for benchmarking both the benchmarking design as the benchmarking process are crucial. Currently literature focuses on the design of the benchmarking method. This study found that the benchmarking process confronts challenges mainly related to data analytics
Marginal gains for major improvements: A user-centered cycling shoe to increase performance for elite short-course triathletes
No full textThe domain of triathlon seems promising for Cadomotus, a company specialising in helmets, bags, and shoes. Right now, they are known for high-end ice-skating equipment, but the triathlon market seems a great fit and they want to expand further there. A new triathlon specific product would solidify Cadomotus in the market as truly understanding triathletes’ desires and demands. A user-centered design process was used, meaning that athletes were involved in every crucial step. A double diamond design process was used. The results of the discovery phase were synthesised into a user-journey with 23 different design opportunities. Together with the company and users these were narrowed down to one design brief.A creative session started the developing phase. Here four different concepts were generated, prototyped and evaluated. One of them was chosen for further development in the delivery phase. The delivery phase consisted of an iterative process going from paper to high-fidelity prototypes. This concept was put through a final usage evaluation, and its insights led to the Talaria. A new triathlon specific cycling shoe.The reaction of users to the design was mostly positive. “I dare to say that I have almost mastered this element of transitioning and then directly getting into cycling, but this would work even quicker” - Sem.The Talaria addresses two concrete needs: getting in and out quicker and stop the shoe from spinning during the second transition. The quicker athletes can get in or out of shoes, the better they can perform during their race. Especially in elite short-course racing this is vital. The spinning shoes are a phenomenon where the shoe hits the ground and starts spinning, which in turn can cause the bike to ‘jump’, creating stress and a potentially unsafe situation. Design for Interactio
Bridging the gap: the workforce-patient dynamics: Understanding system behaviour of the social-organisational mental health care system to increase health care sustainability: a focus study on alcohol use disorders in the Netherlands
No full textSubstance use disorders, particularly alcohol use disorder (AUD), are a major global health challenge, significantly impacting morbidity and mortality rates. In the Netherlands, around 20% of the population is affected by excessive alcohol consumption, with a notable treatment gap and disproportionate effects on the elderly. Despite increased research into AUD treatments, patient numbers remain stable, straining healthcare systems. Moreover, the Dutch government anticipates that addressing the needs of both diagnosed and undiagnosed patients, the workforce should be increased in the general healthcare sector from the current level of 16.67% to 25% of the total Dutch workforce by 2040. Furthermore, existing regulations and policies appear inadequate in effectively managing these demands.This study aims to explore the socio-organisational drivers and policy effects on the Dutch mental health care system, focusing on AUD, to maintain sustainable quality care. It examines organizational drivers, expert perspectives, policy influence on system dynamics, and the relationship between capacity shortages and care quality. The research employs a mixed-method approach, including a literature review, exploratory interviews, a Participatory System Dynamics Modeling (PSDM) workshop, and a comparative analysis of data from 12 mental health services (MHS).Key findings include the significance of internal factors like patient satisfaction and therapeutic alliance, and the crucial role of over and undertreatment considerations during treatment processes. External factors like self-coping, and individualization and blurring of alcohol in shops also influence both treatment effectiveness and alcohol consumption. Current policy regulations inadvertently contribute to capacity shortages and treatment gaps. System Dynamics (SD) modelling reveals that increased regulatory pressures and quality care demands lead to capacity being consumed by administrative tasks and budget gaps. This relates to a 'fixes that fail' archetype, combined with social dynamics like an ageing population and increased alcohol consumption, exacerbates the 'growth and underinvestment' archetype in the Dutch mental healthcare system.The study highlights the unintended consequences of current policies, such as disjointed preventive measures and reduced practitioner autonomy. It also emphasizes the complexity of healthcare systems as revealed by the challenge of identifying cause-and-effect due to multiple aggregational levels, the diverse perspectives on the system both by literature and experts, the varied healthcare contexts and the multi-disciplinary and collaborative nature of (mental) healthcare. Key limitations include not fully addressing safety in health quality and challenges in integrating quantitative methods.This thesis underscores the importance of a holistic approach in healthcare, considering both social and organizational aspects. It suggests that current policies may lead to over-regulation or insufficient prevention awareness, impacting both society and MHS organisations. Adopting a holistic system approach can enhance further understanding of policy impacts crucial for preventing a growing treatment-capacity gap and ensuring a sustainable mental health care system for society’s vulnerable members.Engineering and Policy Analysi
Axiomatic Thinking in Neural IR: An axiomatic approach to diagnosing deep IR models
No full textAfter surpassing human performance in the fields of Computer Vision, Speech Recognition and NLP, deep learning has been gaining scientific ground in IR. In spite of the sheer amount of publications that have proposed so-called neural IR approaches over the past decade, the field has not achieved the kind of progress seen in related fields. Over the past year or so, works have begun to solve the issues that complicate the progress of neural applications in IR. Among those issues we can find the lack of approaches to interpret and analyze neural IR models, which is addressed in this thesis. We propose a novel approach to diagnose retrieval models that is rooted in the axiomatic approach to IR. Axioms encapsulate search heuristics that are expressed as constraints on retrieval functions. Existing axiomatic approaches have provided fruitful analyses of traditional IR models but are no longer viable to study neural IR models. Building forth on these approaches, we propose a novel approach to empirically analyze retrieval functions, suitable for neural models. Based on inspirations from the NLP and Computer Vision communities, we use model-agnostic diagnostic datasets in order to determine what kind of search heuristics models are able to learn. Since the creation of diagnostic datasets does not require a labeled dataset, we can apply the proposed pipeline to almost any dataset containing queries and documents. We have shown for four specific axioms how to extend and relax them, in order to make them fit for obtaining diagnostic datasets. We have applied our diagnostic dataset creation pipeline to the WikiPassageQA and MSMarco corpora and evaluated three traditional baselines and six neural models. Our experiments on the WikiPassageQA dataset show that the proposed approach can indeed diagnose strengths and weaknesses of neural models. However, our experiments on the MSMarco dataset show that an axiomatic analysis based on the four axioms does not always diagnose factors that incur retrieval effectiveness. An interesting direction for future work is therefore to include more axioms in the diagnostic approach. As possible extensions of the work carried out in this thesis, several roads of future work have been proposed. Among them, we can find reproducing experiments on other neural toolkits and employing the methodology on different IR tasks, but also researching the validity of axioms and adopting a specialized metric for axiomatic performance. We furthermore identified various opportunities to use diagnostic datasets beyond diagnosing neural models. Concluding, we believe that the axiomatic approach to diagnosing neural IR models presented in this work is a step forward to gaining valuable insights into the black boxes that deep models are generally considered to be. We hope our work may prove a fruitful resource for analysis in the field of neural IR on the road towards achieving superior performance without losing sight of a better fundamental understanding of IR
A new convective model of the Weddell Polyny: Deep convection in the Southern Ocean
No full textThe Weddell Polynya, a large hole in the Antarctic sea ice, reappeared in 2017. The polynya forms due to deep convection, which is caused by static instability of the water column. Observations and model studies show periodic heat accumulation in the subsurface layer prior to a polynya. This heat accumulation could be caused by internal ocean dynamics: the Southern Ocean Mode. Periodic subsurface heat and salt accumulation could be the major driver in causing periodic deep convection, which is in contrast with earlier studies. These studies focus on surface processes, and see the polynya as an irregular event. In this study a simple convective model is used to look into this contrast. Model simulations excluding and including periodic subsurface heat and salt fluxes have been performed. Multiple polynya events were only simulated in the model set up including subsurface fluxes. The dominant frequency for polynya events in these simulations equals the frequency of the subsurface heat and salt accumulation. This frequency is still visible in runs with white noise added to the freshwater flux, showing the importance and dominance of the subsurface forcing. In combination with earlier studies, this study suggests that periodic subsurface processes are most dominant and govern the initial formation and periodicity of the Weddell Polynya
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