92,483 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Training senior employees for ICT skills enhancement through “refocus”: The EUROPEAN project
Declining fertility rates and the ageing of the European population represents a major challenge to many governments within the European Union (EU) and its neighbouring realms, in the present and for the forthcoming decades. The increasing ageing workforce within several United Kingdom (UK) and the EU private and public organisations is an evident manisfestation. The workforce comprised of senior employees are often seen by employers as less mobile and flexible with low performance and thus, less able to deal with the rapid changes occurring in their organisations; as rapid developments require flexible and responsive workforce. The mobility of the senior employees is therefore a topical theme in the workforce market. The necessary knowledge and skills required for the senior employees can be taught through various Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) related training systems within an organisation. However, it appears that the development of training systems required for senior employees need careful investigation into the requirements of the problem situation. The reason is that the design of senior employees training systems should be more carefully planned, as literature indicates that it is significantly time consuming and is harder to train senior employees on ICT applications. This paper presents a European project – REFOCUS (oldeR Employees training on inFOrmation and CommUnication technologieS), an initaitive undertaken by the EU for enhancing the ICT skills of the ageing workforce. This project also aims at designing a new electronic learning (e-Learning) method that focuses on the needs of senior employees of 40 years of age and over – who can become a strategic resource for the European economy
Spinor-Vector Duality in Heterotic String Orbifolds
The three generation heterotic-string models in the free fermionic
formulation are among the most realistic string vacua constructed to date,
which motivated their detailed investigation. The classification of free
fermion heterotic string vacua has revealed a duality under the exchange of
spinor and vector representations of the SO(10) GUT symmetry over the space of
models. We demonstrate the existence of the spinor-vector duality using
orbifold techniques, and elaborate on the relation of these vacua to free
fermionic models.Comment: 20 pages. v2 minor corrections. Version to appear on JHEP. v3
misprints correcte
Palindromic Length of Words with Many Periodic Palindromes
The palindromic length of a finite word is the minimal
number of palindromes whose concatenation is equal to . In 2013, Frid,
Puzynina, and Zamboni conjectured that: If is an infinite word and is
an integer such that for every factor of then
is ultimately periodic.
Suppose that is an infinite word and is an integer such
for every factor of . Let be the set
of all factors of that have more than
palindromic prefixes. We show that is an infinite set and we show
that for each positive integer there are palindromes and a word such that is a factor of and is nonempty. Note
that is a periodic word and is a palindrome for each . These results justify the following question: What is the palindromic
length of a concatenation of a suffix of and a periodic word with
"many" periodic palindromes?
It is known that ,
where and are nonempty words. The main result of our article shows that
if are palindromes, is nonempty, is a nonempty suffix of ,
is the minimal period of , and is a positive integer
with then
Exploiting Nonlinear Recurrence and Fractal Scaling Properties for Voice Disorder Detection
Background: Voice disorders affect patients profoundly, and acoustic tools can potentially measure voice function objectively. Disordered sustained vowels exhibit wide-ranging phenomena, from nearly periodic to highly complex, aperiodic vibrations, and increased "breathiness". Modelling and surrogate data studies have shown significant nonlinear and non-Gaussian random properties in these sounds. Nonetheless, existing tools are limited to analysing voices displaying near periodicity, and do not account for this inherent biophysical nonlinearity and non-Gaussian randomness, often using linear signal processing methods insensitive to these properties. They do not directly measure the two main biophysical symptoms of disorder: complex nonlinear aperiodicity, and turbulent, aeroacoustic, non-Gaussian randomness. Often these tools cannot be applied to more severe disordered voices, limiting their clinical usefulness.

Methods: This paper introduces two new tools to speech analysis: recurrence and fractal scaling, which overcome the range limitations of existing tools by addressing directly these two symptoms of disorder, together reproducing a "hoarseness" diagram. A simple bootstrapped classifier then uses these two features to distinguish normal from disordered voices.

Results: On a large database of subjects with a wide variety of voice disorders, these new techniques can distinguish normal from disordered cases, using quadratic discriminant analysis, to overall correct classification performance of 91.8% plus or minus 2.0%. The true positive classification performance is 95.4% plus or minus 3.2%, and the true negative performance is 91.5% plus or minus 2.3% (95% confidence). This is shown to outperform all combinations of the most popular classical tools.

Conclusions: Given the very large number of arbitrary parameters and computational complexity of existing techniques, these new techniques are far simpler and yet achieve clinically useful classification performance using only a basic classification technique. They do so by exploiting the inherent nonlinearity and turbulent randomness in disordered voice signals. They are widely applicable to the whole range of disordered voice phenomena by design. These new measures could therefore be used for a variety of practical clinical purposes.

Evolution of New cis-Regulatory Motifs Required for Cell-Specific Gene Expression in Caenorhabditis
Patterning of C. elegans vulval cell fates relies on inductive signaling. In this induction event, a single cell, the gonadal anchor cell, secretes LIN-3/EGF and induces three out of six competent precursor cells to acquire a vulval fate. We previously showed that this developmental system is robust to a four-fold variation in lin-3/EGF genetic dose. Here using single-molecule FISH, we find that the mean level of expression of lin-3 in the anchor cell is remarkably conserved. No change in lin-3 expression level could be detected among C. elegans wild isolates and only a low level of change-less than 30%-in the Caenorhabditis genus and in Oscheius tipulae. In C. elegans, lin-3 expression in the anchor cell is known to require three transcription factor binding sites, specifically two E-boxes and a nuclear-hormone-receptor (NHR) binding site. Mutation of any of these three elements in C. elegans results in a dramatic decrease in lin-3 expression. Yet only a single E-box is found in the Drosophilae supergroup of Caenorhabditis species, including C. angaria, while the NHR-binding site likely only evolved at the base of the Elegans group. We find that a transgene from C. angaria bearing a single E-box is sufficient for normal expression in C. elegans. Even a short 58 bp cis-regulatory fragment from C. angaria with this single E-box is able to replace the three transcription factor binding sites at the endogenous C. elegans lin-3 locus, resulting in the wild-type expression level. Thus, regulatory evolution occurring in cis within a 58 bp lin-3 fragment, results in a strict requirement for the NHR binding site and a second E-box in C. elegans. This single-cell, single-molecule, quantitative and functional evo-devo study demonstrates that conserved expression levels can hide extensive change in cis-regulatory site requirements and highlights the evolution of new cis-regulatory elements required for cell-specific gene expression
Stable schedule matching under revealed preference
Baiou and Balinski (Math. Oper. Res., 27 (2002) 485) studied schedule matching where one determines the partnerships that form and how much time they spend together, under the assumption that each agent has a ranking on all potential partners. Here we study schedule matching under more general preferences that extend the substitutable preferences in Roth (Econometrica 52 (1984) 47) by an extension of the revealed preference approach in Alkan (Econom. Theory 19 (2002) 737). We give a generalization of the GaleShapley algorithm and show that some familiar properties of ordinary stable matchings continue to hold. Our main result is that, when preferences satisfy an additional property called size monotonicity, stable matchings are a lattice under the joint preferences of all agents on each side and have other interesting structural properties
Impurity scattering in a d-wave superconductor
The influence of (non-magnetic and magnetic) impurities on the transition
temperature of a d-wave superconductor is studied anew within the framework of
BCS theory. Pairing interaction decreases linearly with the impurity
concentration. Accordingly suppression is proportional to the
(potential or exchange) scattering rate, , due to impurities. The
initial slope versus is found to depend on the superconductor contrary
to Abrikosov-Gor'kov type theory. Near the critical impurity concentration
drops abruptly to zero. Because the potential scattering rate is
generally much larger than the exchange scattering rate, magnetic impurities
will also act as non-magnetic impurities as far as the decrease is
concerned. The implication for the impurity doping effect in high
superconductors is also discussed.Comment: 12 pages and 1 figure, PlainTex, submitted to Mod. Phys. Lett. B, For
more information, please see "http://taesan.kaist.ac.kr/~yjkim
Professional appraisal of online information about children’s footwear measurement and fit : readability, usability and quality
Parents increasingly use the internet to seek health information, share information and for purchasing textiles and footwear. This shift in footwear purchasing habits raises concern about how (and if) parents are getting their children's feet measured, and what support strategies are in place to support the fit of footwear. In response to this, some companies and healthcare organisations have developed resources to support home measurement of foot size, and link these measures to footwear selection, measurement and fitting. The aim of this research was to undertake an appraisal of web-based resources about measurement and fit of children's footwear, focussing specifically on readability, usability and quality. Search terms relating to children's foot measurement were compiled and online searching was undertaken. Search results were saved and screened for relevance. Existing resources were categorised based on their source e.g. a footwear company or a health website. The 15 most commonly identified resources were reviewed by a professional panel for readability, content, usability and validity. One researcher also assessed the accessibility and reading ease of the resources. Online resources were predominantly from commercial footwear companies (54%). Health information sources from professional bodies made up 4.2% of the resources identified. The top 15 resources had appropriate reading ease scores for parents (SMOG Index 4.3-8.2). Accessibility scores (the product of the number of times it appeared in search results and its ranking in the results) were highest for commercial footwear companies. The panel scores for readability ranged from 2.7 to 9 out of 10, with a similar range for content, usability and validity. Information for parents seeking to purchase footwear for their children is readily available online but this was largely dominated by commercial footwear companies. The quality and usability of this information is of a moderate standard; notable improvements could be made to the validity of the task the child is asked to undertake and the measures being taken. Improvements in these resources would improve the data input to the selection of footwear and therefore have a beneficial impact on footwear fit in children. [Abstract copyright: © The Author(s). 2020.
- …