Tabling as a Library with Delimited Control

Tabling is probably the most widely studied extension of Prolog. But despite its importance and practicality, tabling is not implemented by most Prolog systems. Existing approaches require substantial changes to the Prolog engine, which is an investment out of reach of most systems. To enable more widespread adoption, we present a new implementation of tabling in under 600 lines of Prolog code. Our lightweight approach relies on delimited control and provides reasonable performance.Comment: 15 pages. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), Proceedings of ICLP 201

Event generation with SHERPA 1.1

In this paper the current release of the Monte Carlo event generator Sherpa, version 1.1, is presented. Sherpa is a general-purpose tool for the simulation of particle collisions at high-energy colliders. It contains a very flexible tree-level matrix-element generator for the calculation of hard scattering processes within the Standard Model and various new physics models. The emission of additional QCD partons off the initial and final states is described through a parton-shower model. To consistently combine multi-parton matrix elements with the QCD parton cascades the approach of Catani, Krauss, Kuhn and Webber is employed. A simple model of multiple interactions is used to account for underlying events in hadron--hadron collisions. The fragmentation of partons into primary hadrons is described using a phenomenological cluster-hadronisation model. A comprehensive library for simulating tau-lepton and hadron decays is provided. Where available form-factor models and matrix elements are used, allowing for the inclusion of spin correlations; effects of virtual and real QED corrections are included using the approach of Yennie, Frautschi and Suura.Comment: 47 pages, 21 figure

Forest pest control : commercial pesticide applicator training (2011)

New 6/09; Reviewed 3/11/OD

Patient handling ergonomics

The incidence of musculoskeletal injuries among healthcare workers has been well documented in the medical and ergonomic literature. The epidemiological evidence demonstrates high injury rate among nurses, nurse\u27s aides, therapists and other medical workers who frequently handle patients. The biomechanical research has shown large compressive forces developed in the lumbar spine performing various patient handling transfers that exceed the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health\u27s recommended guideline. One of the most strenuous patient handling tasks is transferring the patient from bed to the chair and vice versa. One of the objectives of this thesis is to design and conduct a laboratory experiment to determine whether six experienced physical therapists and physical therapy assistants can accurately and consistently assess the patient\u27s functional level based on a widely used grading system for a non-dependent patient. An additional objective is to measure the lumbar spinal compression forces during the assisted transfers to investigate whether they pose a risk of injury to the lumbar spine for healthcare workers. In the past, the reliability of this functional grading system and the biomechanical risk of performing assisted transfers has never been evaluated. The hand coupling forces and the therapist\u27s perceived exertion was recorded and analyzed to verify the therapist\u27s accuracy using the grading system on a patient. A small, able-bodied male, posing as a patient, was transferred from bed and from wheelchair using a gait belt. The therapists were consistent in their grading of the assistance level for the transfer from the bed with an average R2 value of 0.62 and an overall correlation coefficient of 0.95. For the transfers from the wheelchair, the gradings were not well correlated with the respective values of 0.34 and 0.41. This low correlation was attributed to the mismatch between the varying anthropometry of the therapists with respect to the fixed lower height of the wheelchair. The spinal compression forces at L5/S 1 assessed for one large male therapist and one small female therapist were under the recommended safe level of 3400 N. The maximum spinal compression force was 2100 N using a static biomechanical model. The transfers, under the same experimental conditions, were extrapolated to 50th and 95th percentile bodyweight patients, with and without gait belts. Results revealed that the gait belt transfers continued to remain under the safe lumbar load levels. For larger patients requiring higher levels of assistance, the transfers performed without the gait belt ranged from 3555 to 4143 N, which is over the recommended safe limit. These biomechanical findings should assist healthcare workers in deciding whether to handle patients with manual or mechanical technique

Evaluation of Micro-Pathogens Associated with Nigerian Currency (Naira Notes)

Evaluation of micro-pathogens associated with the Nigerian Currency (Naira note) was examined using the standard microbiological techniques. The bacterial load of the Naira notes ranged from 4.0±0.6x103 cfu/ml to 50.0±0.1x103 cfu/ml which differed significantly (p<0.05) when compared with the control sample which had no bacterial growth. The fungal count of the Naira notes ranged from 3.0±0.9x103 cfu/ml to 23.0±0.1x103 cfu/ml. The following microbial species were isolated with a varying prevalence; Bacillus species 41 (10.3%), Klebsiella species 37 (9.3%), Proteus species 29 (7.3%), Corynebacterium species 28 (7.0%), Staphylococcus epidermidis 24 (6.08%), Staphylococcus saprophyticus 44 (11.0%), Staphylococcus aureus 31 (7.8%), Clostridium species 18 (4.5%), Micrococcus species 16 (4.0%), Escherichiacoli 15 (3.8%), Fusarium species 15 (3.8%), Penicillium species 13 (3.3%), Aspergillusfumigatus 12 (3.0%), Aspergillus flavus 11 (2.8%), Rhizopus species 5 (1.3%), Aspergillus niger 31 (7.8%) and Mucors species 29 (7.3%). The different denominations of the Naira note showed that 20 Naira recorded the highest microbial isolate of 81(20.3%), followed by 10 Naira note 70(17.5%) while the least was 1000 Naira note 18(4.5%). The different denominations of the Naira note showed that 20 Naira had the highest occurrence of bacteria (58) and fungal occurrence of 23, the least was 1000 Naira which recorded the occurrence of 13 and 5 for bacteria and fungi, respectively. The study showed that Naira notes are commonly contaminated with pathogenic microorganisms of public health importance. Therefore, the Nigerian currency (Naira note) should be handled with care so that it will not be a vehicle for disease transmission

Versatile event correlation with algebraic effects

We present the first language design to uniformly express variants of n -way joins over asynchronous event streams from different domains, e.g., stream-relational algebra, event processing, reactive and concurrent programming. We model asynchronous reactive programs and joins in direct style, on top of algebraic effects and handlers. Effect handlers act as modular interpreters of event notifications, enabling fine-grained control abstractions and customizable event matching. Join variants can be considered as cartesian product computations with ”degenerate” control flow, such that unnecessary tuples are not materialized a priori. Based on this computational interpretation, we decompose joins into a generic, naive enumeration procedure of the cartesian product, plus variant-specific extensions, represented in terms of user-supplied effect handlers. Our microbenchmarks validate that this extensible design avoids needless materialization. Alongside a formal semantics for joining and prototypes in Koka and multicore OCaml, we contribute a systematic comparison of the covered domains and features. ERC, Advanced Grant No. 321217 ERC, Consolidator Grant No. 617805 DFG, SFB 1053 DFG, SA 2918/2-