958 research outputs found
Cumulative Trauma Disorders: Their Recognition and Ergonomic Measures to avoid them
No full textCumulative Trauma Disorders (CTD) refers to a large category of disorders of the muscles, tendons, or nerves and are the summary results of microtrauma caused, precipitated, or aggravated by repeated exertion or movements of the body. They go by many names in the literature. They have become a matter of urgent ergonomic concerns for manufacturers, insurance companies, health care provides, and government agencies. Since CTD are usually caused by repeated and/or forceful exertions, often in the hand-arm-shoulder region. They predominantly occur to soft tissues, such as tendons and ligaments, and to nerves and blood vessels. They are commonly associated with certain occupational and leisure activities. Many CTD can be avoided by a set of fairly simple and straightforward ergonomic procedures. In this presentation, the author will share his views on the epidemiology, pathogenesis and treatment including the ergonomic measures to avoid CTD
How Hong Kong students learn using the study process questionnaire: Cross-cultural comparisons
No full textAnecdotal evidence abounds in Hong Kong to the effect that students entering tertiary education are predisposed to a “rote” learning approach. Until the research studies at City Polytechnic of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Polytechnic, there have been no systematic studies performed locally and as such in the absence of cross-cultural research, there is a tendency to rely on anecdotal statements about Hong Kong students’ approaches to learning. This study was designed to see if Hong Kong Chinese students predisposed to a surface or deep approach to learning react differently when moving progressively from one stage to the next stage in their undergraduate occupational therapy curriculum. This study adopted a longitudinal design method which followed a cohort of 80 undergraduate occupational therapy students over two years and measured their changes in their approaches to learning using the Biggs’ Study Process Questionnaire The internal consistency reliability estimates alpha for SPQ scales for samples of Hong Kong, Australian and British students was compared. The alpha estimates of this study varied from 0.56 to 0.75 which compares favourably with other studies reported in Hong Kong, Australia and U.K. The results of this study indicated that the Hong Kong Chinese students demonstrated a higher mean for the deep approach to learning (47.3 in Year 1 and 46.3 in Year 3) and a lower mean for the surface approach (42.7 in Year 1 and 42.4 in Year 3), similar to other Hong Kong studies from other tertiary institutions in Hong Kong and Australia. From the findings, it is reasonable to conclude that students change their approach according to the different demands imposed by their varied learning needs. Based on this belief, the author while ruling out the potential for misunderstandings about Asian students, draws attention to the cross-cultural differences in approaches to learning which highlights on the changing nature of tertiary classroom and the implications for teaching and learning, with the major shift in the characteristic of student population
DIOPTRA-L: Digital Opinions on Translated Literature
No full textA collection of reviews from Goodreads of various well-known fiction and non-fiction books, and their translations. The metadata has been enriched with computed and annotated values:
- the identifier of the review
- the title of the reviewed book
- the original language in which the book was published
- the edition to which the review refers
- the text of the review
- the language of the review (computed)
- the author of the review (username which cannot be related to a person)
- a computed estimate of the author gender (based on the username)
- the age category of a book's target audience (children / young adult / adult), annotated by experts
- the genre of the book, annotated by experts
- the star rating of the book (1 to 5)
- the tokenised text of the review
- whether or not the review mentions translation (0 for false,1 for true)
- how many tokens are in the review
- how many translation lemmas were found in the revie
Metadatapedia: A proposal for aggregating metadata on data archiving
Get PDFThe open access movement has highlighted the barriers that exist for users to gain access to significant portions of the research literature. The open data approach seeks to extend the principles of open access to the data and code that supports the published scholarly record. Current metadata is inadequate to allow information researchers to evaluate claims made about data archiving practices. Assessing current archiving practice and understanding the impact of archiving policies requires improved metadata. We propose that information researchers create an infrastructure for the collection of metadata about data use in the research literature, and that infrastructure should itself be open. The availability of metadata on data use would enable the calculation of archiving indices, just as citation data enables the calculation of the h-index.is peer reviewedSubmitted by Michael Twidale ([email protected]) on 2012-09-21T20:16:04Z
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Genetic programming for the minimum time swing up and balance control acrobot problem
No full textThis work describes how genetic programming is applied to evolving controllers for the minimum time swing up and inverted balance tasks of the continuous state and action: limited torque acrobot. The best swing-up controller is able to swing the acrobot up to a position very close to the inverted ‘handstand’ position in a very short time, shorter than that of Coulom (2004), who applied the same constraints on the applied torque values, and to take only slightly longer than the approach by Lai et al. (2009) where far larger torque values were allowed. The best balance controller is able to balance the acrobot in the inverted position when starting from the balance position for the length of time used in the fitness function in all runs; furthermore, 47 out of 50 of the runs evolve controllers able to maintain the balance position for an extended period, an improvement on the balance controllers generated by Dracopoulos and Nichols (2012), which this paper is extended from. The most successful balance controller is also able to balance the acrobot when starting from a small offset from the balance position for this extended period
Reinforcement learning in continuous state- and action-space
Get PDFReinforcement learning in the continuous state-space poses the problem of the inability to store the values of all state-action pairs in a lookup table, due to both storage limitations and the inability to visit all states sufficiently often to learn the correct values.
This can be overcome with the use of function approximation techniques with generalisation capability, such as artificial neural networks, to store the value function. When this is applied we can select the optimal action by comparing the values of each possible action; however, when the action-space is continuous this is not possible.
In this thesis we investigate methods to select the optimal action when artificial neural networks are used to approximate the value function, through the application of numerical optimization techniques. Although it has been stated in the literature that
gradient-ascent methods can be applied to the action selection [47], it is also stated that solving this problem would be infeasible, and therefore, is claimed that it is necessary to utilise a second artificial neural network to approximate the policy function [21, 55].
The major contributions of this thesis include the investigation of the applicability of action selection by numerical optimization methods, including gradient-ascent along with other derivative-based and derivative-free numerical optimization methods,and the proposal of two novel algorithms which are based on the application of two alternative action selection methods: NM-SARSA [40] and NelderMead-SARSA.
We empirically compare the proposed methods to state-of-the-art methods from the literature on three continuous state- and action-space control benchmark problems
from the literature: minimum-time full swing-up of the Acrobot; Cart-Pole balancing problem; and a double pole variant. We also present novel results from the application of the existing direct policy search method genetic programming to the Acrobot
benchmark problem [12, 14]
Ecological Systems Thinking
No full textWhile the science of ecology has expanded markedly in the past century, that knowledge has not significantly changed the pace of economic growth or deflected the momentum of human expansion. Warnings, including that from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment team, multiply but without a corresponding societal response. The author traces the problem to the realm of politics and the ineffectiveness of statutes such as the National Environmental Policy Act. The article ends with suggestions about how to extend science more effectively into the political realm. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Flame-wall interaction at enhanced turbulence intensities as characterized by ultrafast 1d-cars thermometry
No full textIn practical combustion-based devices, such as internal combustion (IC) engines and gas turbines for power generation, there exists significant interaction between gas-phase combustion and metal surfaces. The nature of this heterogeneous interaction is complex, involving both physical and chemical effects. The metal surface is generally much cooler than impinging flames, and significant heat flux to the metal wall ensues during the flame–wall interaction (FWI). In this work, we investigate FWI in the side-wall quenching canonical configuration obtained with two-beam femtosecond/picosecond 1D-CARS thermometry. The experiments are performed using a generic burner where the turbulence intensities are significantly enhanced by the employment of a turbulence generator grid (blockage 45%). Previously, these operating conditions have only been well-characterized at quasi-stationary conditions (Re = 5000) [Bohlin, A., Jainski, C., Patterson, B.D., Dreizler, A., Kliewer, C.J.: Multiparameter spatiothermochemical probing of flame–wall interactions advanced with coherent Raman imaging. Proc. Combust. Inst. 36, 4557–4564 (2017)]. In these new experiments, complex interplay between the laser diagnostic and the turbulent combustion in the near wall region is overcome, and data is produced, for instance, on the maximum instantaneous temperature gradients versus the position of the flame-front near the wall as determined with direct thermometry contour analysis.Flight Performance and Propulsio
Mechanistic studies of the stress-corrosion cracking behaviour of oriented Cu30Zn single crystals in NaNO2 Solutions
No full textApplied Science
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