3,107 research outputs found
Multimodal hypersensitivity and somatic symptoms predict adolescent postmenarchal widespread pain
No full textData associated with the publication: Osborne NR, Hellman KM, Burda EM, Darnell SE, Singh L, Schrepf AD, Walker LS & Tu FF. Multimodal hypersensitivity and somatic symptoms predict adolescent postmenarchal widespread pain. PAIN. 2025 (in press
Single-Element Characterization of the LS-DYNA MAT54 Material Model
No full textThesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2012Research was completed to characterize the root behavior of the LS-DYNA MAT54 composite orthotropic material model. This primarily involved investigating the constitutive relations, ply failure (damage onset), ply deletion, damage factors, and element deletion. A single shell element under uniaxial tensile and compressive loading was employed to isolate MAT54 behavior for three different idealized laminates. Simulation results were compared against expected behavior from published material properties and experimental testing. A parametric study was also conducted to confirm the behavior of all other MAT54 inputs. Overall the LS-DYNA MAT54 material model adequately predicted Unidirectional (UD), cross-ply, and fabric laminate behavior for the majority of cases. However, results showed pronounced plasticity when the strength-based Chang-Chang ply-failure criteria was reached prior to the strain-based ply-deletion parameters. This led to significant energy and failure strain errors in some cases
Author Attributions in Medieval Text Collections: An Exploration
No full textThis article examines the role and function of author attributions in multi-text manuscripts containing Dutch, English, French or German short verse narratives. The findings represent one strand of the investigations undertaken by the cross-European project ‘The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript’, which analysed the dissemination of short verse narratives and the principles of organisation underlying the compilation of text collections. Whilst short verse narratives are more commonly disseminated anonymously, there are manuscripts in which authorship is repeatedly attributed to a text or corpus. Through six case studies, this article explores medieval concepts of authorship and how they relate to constructions of authority, whether regarding an empirical figure or a literary construction. In addition, it looks at how authorship plays a role in manuscript compilation, and at the effects of attributions (by author and/or compiler) on reception. The case studies include manuscripts from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, produced in a range of social and cultural contexts, and featuring some of the most important European authors of short verse narratives: Rutebeuf, Baudouin de Condé, Der Striker, Konrad von Würzberg, Willem of Hildegaersberch, and Geoffrey Chaucer. The preliminary findings contribute to our understanding of author attributions in text collections from across northern Europe and point towards future lines of enquiry into the role of authorship in medieval textual dissemination
Batch Bayesian Learning of Large-Scale LS-SVMs Based on Low-rank Tensor Networks
No full textLeast Squares Support Vector Machines (LS-SVMs) are state-of-the-art learning algorithms that have been widely used for pattern recognition. The solution for an LS-SVM is found by solving a system of linear equations, which involves the computational complexity of O(N^3). When datasets get larger, solving LS-SVM problems with standard methods becomes burdensome or even unfeasible. The Tensor Train (TT) decomposition provides an approach to representing data in highly compressed formats without loss of accuracy. By converting vectors and matrices in the TT format, the storage and computational requirements can be greatly reduced. In this thesis, we develop a Bayesian learning method in the TT format to solve large-scale LS-SVM problems, which involves the computation of a matrix inverse. This method allows us to include the information we know about the model parameters in the prior distribution. As a result, we are able to obtain a probability distribution of the parameters, which enables us to construct confidence levels of the predictions. In the numerical experiment, we show that the developed method performs competitively with the current methods.Mechanical Engineering | Systems and Contro
Additive Manufacturing: Polymers Applicable for Laser Sintering (LS)
No full textAbstractAdditive Manufacturing (AM) is close to become a production technique changing the way of part fabrication in future. Enhanced complexity and personalized features are aimed. The expectations in AM for the future are enormous and betimes it is considered as kind of the next industrial revolution. Laser Sintering (LS) of polymer powders is one component of the AM production techniques. However materials successfully applicable to Laser Sintering (LS) are very limited today. The presentation picks up this topic and gives a short introduction on the material available today. Important factors of polymer powders, their significance for effective LS processing and analytical approaches to access those values are presented in the main part. Concurrently the exceptional position of polyamide 12 powders is this connection is outlined
The Social Cost-of-Living: Welfare Foundations and Estimation
No full textWe present a new class of social cost-of-living indices and a nonparametric framework for estimating these and other social cost-of- living indices. Common social cost-of-living indices can be understood as aggregator functions of approximations of individual cost-of-living indices. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the expenditure-weighted average of first-order approximations of each individual’s cost-of-living index. This is troubling for three reasons. First, it has not been shown to have a welfare economic foundation for the case where agents are heterogeneous (as they clearly are.) Second, it uses an expenditure-weighted average which downweights the experience of poor households relative to rich households. Finally, it uses only first-order approximations of each individual’s cost-of-living index, and thus ignores substitution effects. We propose a “common-scaling” social cost-of-living index, which is defined as the single scaling to everyone’s expenditure which holds social welfare constant across a price change. Our approach has an explicit social welfare foundation and allows us to choose the weights on the costs of rich and poor households. We also give a unique solution for the welfare function for the case where the weights are independent of household expenditure. A first order approximation of our social cost-of- living index nests as special cases commonly used indices such as the CPI. We also provide a nonparametric method for estimating second- order approximations (which account for substitution effects).Inflation, Social cost-of-living, Demand, Average Derivatives
The Social Cost-of-Living: Welfare Foundations and Estimation
No full textWe present a new class of social cost-of-living indices and a nonparametric framework for estimating these and other social cost-of-living indices. Common social cost-of-living indices can be understood as aggregator functions of approximations of individual cost-of-living indices. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the expenditure-weighted average of first-order approximations of each individual’s cost-of-living index. This is troubling for three reasons. First, it has not been shown to have a welfare economic foundation for the case where agents are heterogeneous (as they clearly are.) Second, it uses an expenditure-weighted average which downweights the experience of poor households relative to rich households. Finally, it uses only first-order approximations of each individual’s cost-of-living index, and thus ignores substitution effects. We propose a “common-scaling” social cost-of-living index, which is defined as the single scaling to everyone’s expenditure which holds social welfare constant across a price change. Our approach has an explicit social welfare foundation and allows us to choose the weights on the costs of rich and poor households. We also give a unique solution for the welfare function for the case where the weights are independent of household expenditure. A first order approximation of our social cost-of-living index nests as special cases commonly used indices such as the CPI. We also provide a nonparametric method for estimating second-order approximations (which account for substitution effects).Inflation, Social cost-of-living, Demand, Average derivatives
Tell us our story: Understanding 'religion and violence' in multiple contexts of learning
No full textThis article raises the question about how definitions of religion and violence can be understood as links to the context in which they are formulated. The focus is on the context of academic learning. Understanding a definition as a micro-narrative that reflects the cultural 'archive', the author uses two academic contexts (i.e. Utrecht, The Netherlands and Jakarta, Indonesia) to show how religion and violence are differently understood. These differences are taken as significant information for understanding how the topic of 'religion and violence' is related to cultural understandings of the place of religion in society. The question is raised how 'narrative learning' can help as a strategy to raise awareness about the preconditioning of (academic) definitions of 'religion and violence'
Very High Energy Gamma-Rays from Binary Systems
No full textThis thesis presents a study of the very high energy (VHE) gamma-ray emission from X-ray binary systems using the H.E.S.S. imaging atmospheric Cherenkov array.
The historical background and basic principles of ground-based gamma-ray astronomy are briefly reviewed and an overview of the design and capabilities of the H.E.S.S. telescope system is presented. The broadband observational properties of X-ray binary systems and their relevance in a broader astrophysical context is also discussed.
A review of the radiative emission mechanisms which relate to VHE gamma-ray emission in X-ray binaries is presented, with emphasis given to the leptonic emission processes of synchrotron radiation and inverse-Compton scattering. Intrinsic absorption processes which act to attenuate the emitted flux of VHE gamma-rays are also discussed. Three computer models are introduced which simulate aspects of the gamma-ray emission and absorption in X-ray binary systems.
A detailed analysis of the VHE gamma-ray emission from the X-ray binary LS 5039 is presented and the relevant procedures for data selection, gamma-hadron separation and background estimation are discussed in some detail. Methods for the determination of detection significance and the calculation of gamma-ray fluxes are also reviewed and results are derived which apply specifically to LS 5039. A detailed temporal analysis of the gamma-ray signal from LS 5039 is presented, applying tests for secular, excess and periodic variability. Strong evidence is found for modulation of the observed gamma-ray flux on the orbital period of ~3.9 days. Following a brief discussion of the procedures required for spectral analysis of VHE gamma-ray data, results are presented for LS 5039 which reveal evidence for spectral variability which is correlated with the observed gamma-ray flux and therefore, the orbital phase of the binary system. The spectral and temporal characteristics of LS 5039 are then compared with the predictions of theoretical models in an attempt to explain the observed behaviour.
Contemporaneous X-ray and VHE gamma-ray observations of three galactic microquasars using the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer and H.E.S.S. are presented. Although no gamma-ray detections are reported, the observations permit the derivation of upper limits to the VHE gamma-ray flux which correspond to episodes of known X-ray behaviour. The X-ray characteristics of each target are compared with pre-existing observational data to infer the presence or otherwise of relativistic outflows at the H.E.S.S. observation epochs. The implications of the gamma-ray non-detections are then discussed in the context of these inferred system properties.
The results of a survey of the VHE gamma-ray emission associated with the positions of 125 known X-ray binaries are presented. Although no conclusive detections were obtained, tentative indications were found for a population of faint, spectrally hard gamma-ray sources associated with high-mass X-ray binary systems. The inferred characteristics of the indicated population show broad agreement with the measured properties of known gamma-ray-emitting X-ray binary systems like LS 5039
Epileptic Seizure Detection using a Tensor-Network Kalman Filter for LS-SVMs
No full textEpilepsy is one of the most common neurological conditions, affecting nearly 1% of the global population. It is defined by the seemingly random occurrence of spontaneous seizures. Anti-epileptic drugs provide adequate treatment for about 70% of patients. The remaining 30%, on the other hand, continue to have seizures, which has a significant impact on their quality of life as they are constantly unsure when these seizures will occur. Reliable seizure detection methods would thus have a significant impact on the lives of these patients. Despite ongoing research efforts involving academia and industry in large international collaborations, epileptic seizure detection and especially prediction is still an unsolved problem. The key to the solution could lie within ultralong-term, reallife datasets that are currently being generated using wearable sensors. However, due to the size of these datasets, conventional learning techniques such as least-square support vector machines (LS-SVMs) can become intractable. Therefore, this work proposes the use of a recently developed tensor network Kalman filtering approach for LS-SVMs (TNKFLSSVM) to detect epileptic seizures [1]. In the TNKF-LSSVM algorithm, the dual problem of the LS-SVM is solved using a recursive Bayesian filtering approach. This way the least-square problem can be solved row-by-row using a Kalman filter, thereby avoiding explicit matrix inversions, while also being able to provide confidence bounds on the estimates. By making use of the tensor-train format [2] to represent the matrices and vectors in the Kalman equations, it is even possible to avoid the construction of the (N + 1) × (N + 1) covariance matrix1. To be able to apply the TNKF-LSSVM algorithm for seizure detection there are still some issues that need to be tackled. One such problem is that the TNKF-LSSVM only performs well when the dataset is properly balanced, which is generally not the case for seizure datasets. Furthermore, for the TNKF-LSSVM to work efficiently for large scale problems the modes of the tensortrains representing the matrices and vectors should be as small as possible, thus it must hold that N + 1 = Q i ni, such that ni is ‘small’ for all i. To overcome both of these challenges we propose using the SMOTE method to oversample the seizure class, such that a balanced training set can be generated that has good factorization properties. Some preliminary results using a small subset of data from a public EEG dataset [3] show that taking the above considerations into account, the TNKF-LSSVM method can have performance that is competitive with a regular LS-SVM. Where the TNKFLSSVM method has the benefit of scaling log-linearly with the size of the dataset (in terms of memory usage) and can provide an uncertainty estimate of the detection. Future work will need 1N is the number of data points in the training set and 1 is added for the bias. to show whether this scaling up works as expected for the entire dataset.Signal Processing System
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